[nick007]

I am a PullRequest user/customer. I shared some of your concerns when I first heard about them, and was admittedly the least on board them trying them vs the others on my team. In short, I didn't believe that an outsider could provide adequate reviews and that, at best, an outsider would supplement our internal review process. I was wrong, and have learned several things about code review from this company.

1. Once ramped up, PullRequest provides consistent reviewers for project, even down to fairly granular sections of the codebase. i.e. we’ll get the same reviewer or sets of reviewers who review code for backend architecture changes, a different person (but consistent) who reviews security code even within a monolithic repo. These reviews feel like a real part of your team after a while, but fully focused on providing quality review.

2. It’s true that the reviews are not involved in initial planning conversations, but in practice this turns out to be moot or even a net positive. This is because they are providing a removed perspective on the review. I can think back to one time very specifically when the team planned to implement a feature in a specific way. An engineer went off and did so as had been planned by the team. An internal review from any of the original teammates who had planned the feature with him would have immediately approved the PR since it was exactly to the original spec. However, our PullRequest reviewer caught a MAJOR VULNERABILITY that the feature’s architecture had presented. Thus, a fresh set of eyes from an outsider who knows our codebase but is not involved in planning/implementation discussions was critical. IMO this is one of PullRequest’s greatest value-adds and why I will always advocate using them /other services like them no matter what team (though I don’t know of any comparable services, though I suspect more will arise and 3rd party review becomes table stakes, but that’s a different discussion).

3. The people that PullRequest gets to do reviews are top notch. In some ways, overkill from what would be required to actually develop a feature from soup to nuts, but it gives us more confidence to let junior developers run more freely on larger features knowing that they will have to pass code review from PullRequest.

[winterplace]

Hi Nick. Is there a reason why PullRequest Reviewers from Canada are also included as an allowed country? Because that country has good rule of law?