Improving Developer Experience with Streamlined Code Reviews

Axolo is not just an integration tool—it’s your team’s shortcut to a smoother, more efficient code review process. By bringing GitHub and GitLab pull requests into the familiar environment of Slack, we cut down the noise and focus on what’s important. Review faster, collaborate better, and ship quality code with confidence. Axolo turns code reviews into a seamless part of your team’s day-to-day, ensuring every pull request is an opportunity for growth, not a bottleneck to your release cycle.

Benefits of using Axolo

1. Enhance Developer Experience

Axolo elevates code reviews from a chore to an interactive discussion, fostering a sense of community and satisfaction among developers. Experience a workflow where collaboration is as enjoyable as it is productive.

2. Preserve Focus

Our intelligent notification system ensures that you’re alerted only when it matters most, helping you maintain focus and reduce unnecessary interruptions. Enjoy the simplicity of Slack-integrated reviews without the clutter.

3. Improve Code Review Efficiency

Say goodbye to the bottlenecks of traditional review processes. Axolo automates and refines your workflow, allowing you to merge code faster and more reliably, without overburdening your developers.

How does Axolo work?

Axolo (opens in a new tab) 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 (opens in a new tab) or with the /axolo command.

Motivation behind Axolo

The motivation behind Axolo is to help engineering teams improve their code review experience and resolve pull requests faster. We believe that:

• stale pull requests are detrimental to developer moral and productivity. 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? (opens in a new tab),
• How to implement the Four Key Accelerate DevOps Metrics (opens in a new tab).

We also share some of our favorite success stories where Axolo helped engineering teams reduce their PR cycle time by 65% (opens in a new tab) or when an engineering team switched from their internal bot to Axolo (opens in a new tab).

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!