DEV Community

Jane
Jane

Posted on

Merge party

Have you ever fallen into a situation when you're trying to refactor your project and ended up dumping thousand line of codes all together in one merge/pull request? Then it becomes hard to split them up.
On the other hand, as a reviewer, do you feel frustrated with the overwhelming changes and get procrastinated to even start the review? And for the beginner reviewer who has no idea what most of the code is all about, that's very challenging to even try to understand.

What about a situation when reviewers come with different opinions? That's right because everyone is different and everyone has different background and experiences.There's also time when the owner of the MR/PR would like to present new functionalities or fancy programming concepts in which he/she needs to convince the team that it will not break the project.

Until at this point, this is the reasonable time to introduce merge party concept to the table. I, myself, just learned this when I joined the current company I am working for. I am blessed as everyone is very competent and open to sharing their bit of useful information.

Okay, so what is merge party? Basically, it's just a group of programmers, engineers, developers of your own team, or any stakeholder who is familiar with the project, the concept, programming languages or beginner who would like to learn sit together and go through the code (hopefully not line by line). The owner of the MR/PR presents the changes, explains reasoning, and most importantly how it is work. Experienced people in the team can ask questions for clarification and offer feedback/suggestions. Beginners, of course, could also do the same.
Merge party comes with the assurance that everyone in the team knows what is going on. Everyone comes out of it with consensus on whether to merge the code or to further adjust something. Most important of all is that we as the MR/PR owners will feel even more safe to merge the code as there are many eyes on it before it will land to main branch.
Additionally, as engineers, we get the chance to improve our presentation skill and also understand what we write even better when explaining to people.

Top comments (0)