Dan Stroot

Why Automate Code Reviews?

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1 min read

Ask a programmer to review 10 lines of code, they'll make 10 suggestions. Ask them to review 1,000 lines of code and they'll say "it looks good!"

Many people have begun integrating bots into the GitHub ecosystem for code review. For example the folks who created the Bootstrap UI framework created a bot called rorshach to perform sanity checks on pull requests. If the sanity check fails it leaves a nice informative comment, explaining the issue and how to fix it.

There is another example at BetterDiff. The idea there is that instead of having humans go through and give cursory reviews, you have a round of automated review by bots (using normal, industry-standard tooling) and it comments on the pull request just like a reviewer would.

Pretty soon I expect to see "when tests pass, and code reviews pass, then go ahead and merge the code" bots.

Welcome to the future.

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