I talked about the Merge Games in somewhat of a jest, but more seriously, there is a lot to worry about once you have long running branches. In our case, it isn’t so much that we have a lot of long running branches as we have a ton of changes that are happening in multiple branches in parallel and it sometimes can take a few weeks until the work is done and we can merge it all.

This put a lot o pressure on the code review part of the process. One of the things that I really like with GitHub is the PR / review processes, and it works great when you have a small commits / PRs. The problem is that when you are talking about large scope of work, you are left with few options for proper review.

One option is to get a PR with dozens of commits, and having to slog through each of them to understand what is going on. Another is to get a PR with a single commit, that contains a lot of changes. This means that you have to grasp the whole change in one shot. Either option is really hard, and can lead the reviewer to skim through the code.  That isn’t something that we want to do, instead, we really want to pay as much attention to the code as we did while writing it.

My process for handling this is to lean heavily on GitHub. What I do is create a PR very early in the process, sometimes immediately after the first commit in that branch. That gives me the ability to review things incrementally. Instead of having to deal with it all at once, I can review the changes as they come in. Whenever one of the developers push their commits, I’ll get a notification about be able to go over the details and comment on the spot.

That shortens the feedback cycle and remove a lot of the complexity from the review process. It also means that we can more easily note that one developer is doing something that is also being done by another team, so we can integrate the work earlier in the process.