Stash is getting social with the introduction of Pull Requests, the most requested feature since the release of Stash 1.0. Download the beta today and get a preview of Stash 1.3.
What are Pull Requests?
Pull Requests provide a quick and easy way to review changes made on a branch, discuss these changes, make further modifications and merge the branch back to master or your main development branch. It’s like a pre-commit review in the centralised world of version control, except that your changes are already in the repository and available to other members of your team.
Start a discussion
Getting your changes reviewed by your colleagues has never been easier. Create a new Pull Request by pressing the Pull Request button in the repository header.
Select the branch you’ve been working on, the branch you want to merge to, add a short description and you’re done.
Stash will even show a preview of all the changesets that will become part of this Pull Requests, so you know exactly what will be reviewed and merged.
The anatomy of a Pull Request
Once you’ve created a Pull Request you will find 3 main sections:
Activity
This is the overview for the Pull Requests, providing useful information such as:
- The branches that will be merged
- A description of the request
- The status (open, closed, merged)
- Participants
But most importantly this section provides the entire activity for this Pull Request. Status changes, comments or new pushes are all recorded and you can follow along to find out what happened during the lifetime of this request. You can start a discussion or reply to existing comments directly in the activity stream.
Branch Diff
Stash will not only show you the changes on the branch, but actually the result of the final merge. That way you can discover and resolve conflicts ahead of time. But best of all, Stash allows you to comment directly on the code, allowing you to discuss work that could be improved, point out mistakes, or give some kudos for a change.
Commits
The commits section will list all individual commits on the branch. If there are a lot of changes, you might want to glance over the commit messages to get a better understanding of the work that happened and dig into the actual commits if required.
Stay organised
You want to make sure that old Pull Requests don’t pile up, that’s why Stash lists the oldest requests first. Just like you would pick tasks from the top of the backlog, you pick Pull Requests from the top of the list and get them done one by one.
We are pretty excited about Pull Requests and are using them heavily already. Join us and download the beta today.