Using GitHub Copilot for Pull Request Reviews: Benefits, Best Practices, and Real-World Experience

Jonny Hackett Agentic AI & AI-Accelerated Development, All Industries, Articles, Artificial Intelligence, Testing Leave a Comment

In this article, I’ll share how I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for PR reviews, where it provides the most value, where it falls short, and the best practices I’ve found for incorporating it into an effective code review workflow.

While most developers think of Copilot as a tool for assisting in writing code (Copilot Chat) or autocompleting code (Copilot plugin in your favorite IDE), itโ€™s during pull request reviews that I find Copilot the most impressive. GitHub Copilot can analyze code changes, generate summaries, identify potential issues, and even suggest fixes before another developer ever opens the PR…

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The Executable Code Review

Tim Broyles Articles, Programming, Testing Leave a Comment

Testing has a bad rap. The thought of writing unit tests to exercise code with the goal of 100% code coverage can be overwhelming for many projects. The number of man-hours to set up tests, create mocks when needed, test boundary conditions, contrive odd ball test cases can take some steam out of the project. If this is the definition of test, then yes, writing these types of tests can be tedious and feel meaningless.

I am a proponent of writing tests with a narrow focus. The tests I describe here show the completion of a story or the resolution of a bug. With this narrowness in mind, the task is much less daunting. My goal now is not about code coverage, but more about quality code. With this test, I want to be able to demonstrate to myself (and to whoever is reviewing my changes), that I have successfully resolved my task.

In this blog I will talk about my suggestions for writing meaningful tests in the context of a code review.

Tips for Code Review Success

Adrienne Gessler Articles, Programming 6 Comments

Attention: This article was published over 13 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in various group peer code reviewing scenarios and sometimes I find myself wondering โ€“ is this worth …