Review pull requests in Slack to merge code faster

Axolo opens a temporary Slack channel for every GitHub pull request or GitLab merge request. It will invite the author and its reviewers to the channel, notify them of relevant events like code comments, GitHub Actions, Deployments, PR checks or GitLab CI/CD. Then, Axolo will archive the channel once you close or merge the pull request.

With Axolo, your engineering team gains a high-level view on your current sprint, can search through every open pull request from any team-specific channel, our Home in Slack or with the /axolo command.

This documentation is intended to help engineering leaders and developers to install and configure Axolo to better suit their needs. By convention, we will use the term pull request for both pull request in GitHub and merge request in GitLab.

Motivation#

The motivation behind Axolo is to help engineering teams resolve pull requests faster and engage more around the code. We believe that:

• stale pull requests are detrimental to developer productivity and the faster they are merged the faster one can focus on a new task ahead,
• the more a team is engaging with each other's code, the easier it is to make everyone agree and find solutions,
• good communication is essential to developer productivity and well-being.

Through our work, we have implemented in Axolo what researchers and performing engineering teams considered best practices. We often share the results of our researches, as What is developer productivity and how to measure it? or How to implement the Four Key Accelerate DevOps Metrics.

Threads vs Channels#

Why not just do a thread instead of a whole channel? Isn't it overkill? We get this question from time to time.

The 4 reasons behind creating a channel:

1. Fewer notifications. Inviting only the right people in the newly created channel instead of notifying a whole squad for every single pull request.
2. Conversations, where there are 3 developers or more, are easier to manage in a channel than in a single thread (cf screenshot).
3. Code comments are passed on to the channel, and we can easily answer them in a thread.
4. Channels act as an Inbox Zero and are a productivity hack for developers, you have a feeling of achievement for every channel you archive.

Axolo community#

Axolo is here thanks to its community of developers. Community members are key to Axolo development, we carefully listen to your feedback to build the future of code collaboration. Most of the features asked by the community are quickly implemented if they make sense to Axolo development, and if you don't believe us, try us!