At GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco, GitHub co-founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath announced new tools and features aimed to improve collaboration through formal code reviews and Kanban-like project management. Additionally, GitHub will make it easier to integrate with the platform by launching a public platform roadmap and defining a formal process to solicit feedback and launch updates.
Reviews
GitHub has long supported informal code reviews by means of comments attached to specific lines of code in a pull request. GitHub Reviews now lets you formally request changes and approve them in a pull request. Reviews may be used as a more sophisticated communication mechanism, or “required” by administrators, so a pull request can be merged only if all changes requested through its reviews have been addressed. As Wanstrath explains, more improvements related to code reviews are in the works:
These changes are only the first step of a much greater roadmap toward faster, friendlier code reviews. We’re working on a handful of follow-up feature improvements—including the ability to request reviews from your peers.
More details about GitHub Reviews can be found in the official documentation.
Projects
Projects provide a Kanban-like board to integrate project management with GitHub repositories. They make it possible to create cards from pull requests, issues, or notes and organize them into custom columns to represent their flow through a sequence of states such as “Backlog”, “In progress”, “Done”, etc. Cards can be dragged and dropped from one column to another to change that card’s state or within the same column to change priority.
Improved platform integration
Wanstrath also announced a new effort to make it easier to build 3rd-party tools that collaborate transparently with GitHub, including:
- A public platform roadmap to learn what new features are coming to the platform
- A formalized process to solicit feedback and launch updates
- A new early-access and pre-release program to grant access to new features and APIs. A first example of this is the GitHub GraphQL API Early Access, aimed to let developers access all the data they need
- The GitHub Platform Forum to provide a direct communication channel between integrators and GitHub engineers.
Finally, GitHub is going to introduce a few new features for organizations, such as two-factor authentication enforcement and better permission management through SAML-based Single Sign-on.
