Pull Requests & Code Reviews

Creating Pull / Merge Requests

SpiraTeam lets your developers create and manage pull requests when they have finished working on a specific feature or hotfix branch and now want to request that it be merged into the main development branch (typically develop, master or main). Some tools call this a merge request, SpiraTeam calls this a pull request.

The pull request functionality builds on top of the powerful source code management features that let you view source code files and commits as well as see the detailed code differences contained within each commit action.

SpiraTeam makes it easy to create new pull requests, all you need to do is enter the name of the source code branch that you want to request being pulled into the main development branch, specify the name of the person who will be doing the review, and mark which release or sprint the functionality is a part of.

SpiraTeam will then create a new special type of task called a Pull Request. This task is used to track the work needed to review the request to merge in the changes from the source branch into the destination branch. These pull request tasks can be filtered and sorted by any of the fields in the pull request list page:

Managing Pull Request Tasks

The pull requests created in SpiraTeam use the flexible task management module to orchestrate the workflow of the code reviews, complete with workflows, comment tracking, email notifications and audit tracking of changes.

The special pull request tasks have an additional Commits tab that is automatically populated by SpiraTeam with the list of source code commits that are in the source branch but not in the destination branch.

This makes it easy for developers to review the source code changes before the merge takes place. This is useful for code reviews, pair programming and code auditing.

Code Reviewing Before Merge

SpiraTeam includes a powerful code drill-down feature, where it will display the list of files that have changed in each of the commit included in the pull request. In addition, SpiraPlan provides links to the associated requirements, user stories, tasks and/or defects so that the code reviewer can check that the code changes make sense in the context of the functionality that was being implemented or changed.

From there, SpiraTeam will show you the detailed source code differences and changes that occurred to this file as part of the overall commit.

As developers review these changes, they can use the standard SpiraTeam task workflow and comment tracking system to capture the feedback and review notes on the source code. That way there is a central place for all code reviews and merge reviews, simplifying distributed collaboration: