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Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

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Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#31

Post by paradite »

fergie wrote: post #16

What are the benefits of reviewers over automated testing? My workflow (which I believe is pretty standard) is: * Write code * Verify that tests pass locally (including stylistic tests, linting) * Submit pull request * Pull request triggers build and tests on Travis * If all tests pass on Travis, code is stylistically and functionally correct * Merge pull request How can human reviewers improve this workflow?

- check for best practices

- check for whether external or downstream services would be affected (in the absence of complete e2e testing)

- check for coding conventions and standards that are not enforceable by linters, such as naming conventions, code structuring, positive/negative testing, effective usage of helper methods

- check for typos

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#32

Post by thruflo22 »

lyal wrote: post #14
tcholas wrote: post #13

Congrats on building this product, guys. This tool is very interesting for startups that have only one developer and freelancers. However, a $49/month pricing may be quite expensive for these people.

Thanks! Pricing is a place we're working out details. We'd like to offer lower tiers for individuals/freelancers in the future for our static and automated tooling.

From a business POV I'd wonder whether the RainforestQA model of much higher pricing ($10,000 per month) with a focus on highly parallel resource deployment (review a lot of code quickly) might be a better strategy.

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#33

Post by lyal »

fitznd wrote: post #29

Great idea! I agree that $49/mo is a bit steep if targeting startups. Though at the same time, each PR could easily take an hour to review so it could get time consuming fast. Is there any free trial?

Yes; because there is a human reviewing, we have to start at a pricepoint that makes sense. Saving time and lowering risk is worth getting really great reviewers - to do that, we need to pay them a great bid per review.

We offer a free review to companies interested in trying us out. Shoot me an email (lyal@ our domain name).

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#34

Post by lyal »

lozzo wrote: post #30

I am very skeptical about this service. Aside from cosmetic changes (which should be automated anyway) code reviews are better served by people who know intimately the problem we are trying to solve. Some code could look pretty neat (and pass the review) but still overall would be a mistake to have it.

Appreciate your view. I think for teams with strong code review practices, we make sense as extra eyes rather than full replacement.

Edit to expand:

We also believe that reviewers attached to projects will gain context quite rapidly. We had a reviewer catch an edge case bug for one of our teams that had gone unnoticed by internal review. Economic side of this would have been large... but was only possible through the context they gained in previous reviews.

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#35

Post by traviswingo »

lyal wrote: post #6
traviswingo wrote: post #4

Seems like a good idea, but I wonder about the true quality of the review? In my experience, only a true team member who's familiar with the project (i.e. has actually been working on it) can provide a quality code review. Beyond that, they're just looking at ways to optimize blocks or find weird bugs in non-breaking recursive lines...

Great insight. Definitely something we are tackling. For once off reviews on an individual pull request, it can be challenging to do anything but surface review. As a result, we're building some summarization tools to help provide context rapidly to a reviewer. Over the lifetime of a project, we have reviewers assigned to the same projects so that they build up context, in the same way that team members do.

That's great :). Most problems worth solving aren't easy by any means. This could be a huge market if you do it right!

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#36

Post by icebraining »

fitznd wrote: post #29

Great idea! I agree that $49/mo is a bit steep if targeting startups. Though at the same time, each PR could easily take an hour to review so it could get time consuming fast. Is there any free trial?

To me, $49/m seems impossibly cheap for a service that requires quite specialized human skill, not to mention the vetting and risks inherit to handling IP from other companies. And I come from one of the poorer EU countries, not from SV.

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#37

Post by icebraining »

maaaats wrote: post #18
fergie wrote: post #16

What are the benefits of reviewers over automated testing? My workflow (which I believe is pretty standard) is: * Write code * Verify that tests pass locally (including stylistic tests, linting) * Submit pull request * Pull request triggers build and tests on Travis * If all tests pass on Travis, code is stylistically and functionally correct * Merge pull request How can human reviewers improve this workflow?

Those things have nothing to do with a PR, other than maybe a PR being a good way to say "this is done, let's automatically verify it". A PR is about showing the rest of the team the changes so more than one person knows how stuff work and what's going on in the code base. And for the rest of the team to give feedback on stuff like how the feature was architected, not to nitpick on indenting.

A PR is about showing the rest of the team the changes so more than one person knows how stuff work and what's going on in the code base.

But that's not really applicable here, right?

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#38

Post by bberenberg »

Do we expect them to provide feedback like "this algorithm is not right because XYZ" or "I fixed this algorithm to work correctly". Those are very different levels of service and I think defining exactly what someone should expect will really helps set expectations.

I also think that this seems absurdly cheap, and I can't imagine it scaling with quality reviewers. Would love to be wrong on this one.

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#39

Post by tyler_mann »

bberenberg wrote: post #38

Do we expect them to provide feedback like "this algorithm is not right because XYZ" or "I fixed this algorithm to work correctly". Those are very different levels of service and I think defining exactly what someone should expect will really helps set expectations. I also think that this seems absurdly cheap, and I can't imagine it scaling with quality reviewers. Would love to be wrong on this one.

Thanks for the feedback! I think you are right that we should add more expectations/FAQ section to our website. We expect the feedback to be more of the former, suggestions and comments but still up to the code author to correct and implement. Re: pricing: we are still working out the details of pricing but we believe that we should be able to get quality reviewers at this price. We expect our reviews/custom review client over time to help increase our efficiency to drive costs down.

Re: Launch HN: PullRequest (YC S17) – On-Demand Code Review

#40

Post by redm »

I like this idea, it seems useful for all the ways described. My skepticism comes from the reviewers themselves. I think they will have a hard time attracting and keeping top talent who can provide high-quality reviews as such talent will want to be creating code, not only reviewing it. I'm not sure how they would resolve this.
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