Pull Request and Review Tools Research

Pull Requests

Pull requests let you tell others about changes you've pushed to a branch in a repository on GitHub. Once a pull request is opened, you can discuss and review the potential changes with collaborators and add follow-up commits before your changes are merged into the base branch.

After initializing a pull request, you'll see a review page that shows a high-level overview of the changes between your branch (the compare branch) and the repository's base branch. You can add a summary of the proposed changes, review the changes made by commits, add labels, milestones, and assignees, and @mention individual contributors or teams.

Once you've created a pull request, you can push commits from your topic branch to add them to your existing pull request. These commits will appear in chronological order within your pull request and the changes will be visible in the "Files changed" tab. Other contributors can review your proposed changes, add review comments, contribute to the pull request discussion, and even add commits to the pull request. After you're happy with the proposed changes, you can merge the pull request.

Reviews

Reviews allow collaborators to comment on the changes proposed in pull requests, approve the changes, or request further changes before the pull request is merged.

A review has three possible statuses:

• Comment: Submit general feedback without explicitly approving the changes or requesting additional changes.
• Approve: Submit feedback and approve merging the changes proposed in the pull request.
• Request changes: Submit feedback that must be addressed before the pull request can be merged.

Review Tools

• You can filter files in a pull request by file extension type, such as .html or .js, lack of an extension, code ownership, or dotfiles. You can also use the file tree to filter by file path, navigate between files, or see a high level view of the changed files.
• You can comment on specific sections of a file on a pull request's Files changed tab in the form of individual line comment
• Other people can suggest specific changes to your pull request. You can apply these suggested changes directly in a pull request if you have write access to the repository.
• You can merge a pull request locally to resolve a merge conflict or to test and verify the changes before merging on GitHub