Yesterday, I wrote about how much I loved working with the team at Cloud Four on a recent project.
One of the things they do very well that most dev teams I’ve worked with do not is make full use of GitHub’s PR Templates feature.
In my consulting work, I see a lot of PRs that include either a one-line comment or not description at all.
But Cloud Four’s PRs always include a rich amount of detail that makes it much easier for the reviewer to understand what’s going on and what to look at.
You aren’t treating them like children. That’s just projection because you know what you want from a PR and feel like someone telling you what they want is belittling you. Not everybody wants the same nor has the same expectations from a PR.
Guidelines and rules exist for this very reason: people are different. Adding a CONTRIBUTING.md isn’t treating somebody like a child and PR templates neither.
the CONTRIBUTING.md document has always existed and contains our guidelines. they know what we’ve agreed upon belongs in a PR, and they simply don’t do it. i’d rather have an empty description than a big stupid ignored form template, because the problem isn’t they don’t know but that they don’t care. that’s a problem that forms, in my experience, don’t fix.
@chrash0 @onlinepersona That’s a thing I got told back in university: Technology cannot solve social problems (which is quite frustrating, at least in this case…)
If your colleagues cannot follow guidelines, do not have the common sense to add a description, and completely ignore a form, I think you have a much bigger problem on your hands.