Who‘s Decipad
Decipad is an interactive notebook that allows you to gather information, build models, and bring your ideas to life without any coding required. It is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to make sense of data and use it to solve problems. It allows you to:
- Gather data from various sources, including spreadsheets, databases, and APIs
- Clean and transform data so that it is ready for analysis
- Build statistical models to understand your data
- Create interactive views to share your findings
- Collaborate with others on multiple projects
- Use calculations inside the notebook with a self-developed language
Challenges
Developer behavior
- Pull Request (PR) descriptions lack context and are hard to read, developers spend time communicating back and forth between the code owner and reviewer to understand what was done in the PR
- Lack of rules when PR labeling is the subject. Not every PR is labeled, and each team member uses different labels for the same use case
Allow non-technical staff to understand the goal of the PR
An important aspect of Decipad's process for introducing new features is the Quality Assurance (QA) phase. During this phase, the QA team relies on the PRs as the primary source of information to comprehend what to anticipate in each release. To facilitate this understanding, the PR description must be both easy to understand and with reliable behavior information.
Solution
Reviewpad effectively addresses the challenges faced by Decipad, providing a set of built-ins that take actions when specific behaviors occur, such as:
- Automatically add PR descriptions that are detailed and easy to understand
- Add labels based on folders and file changes
- Add PR size labels based on the total amount of modified lines
- Add labels based on the PR title using a regular expression
- Enforce a “Product Pledge” checklist.
Reviewpad's /reviewpad summarize automatically generates the PR description. With the use of AI all the commits are analyzed, and based on them, a comprehensive description is made. This reduces the amount of time spent producing PRs descriptions and guarantees that all PRs have a description.
Reviewpad's built-ins $hasFileExtensions and $addLabel help to categorize PRs based on the folder they are.
Reviewpad's built-ins $size() and $addLabel help to categorize our PRs accordingly. This labeling system makes it more convenient to grasp what each pull request entails when selecting them for review, helping developers organize their agenda as reviewers.
Reviewpad's built-in $matchString helps to analise the title for patterns and execute action based on the title.
Reviewpad's built-ins $matchString, $extractMarkdownHeadingContent and $description() allow to enforce the need of a “Product Pledge” check list in the PR.
Conclusion
Reviewpad allowed the Decipad team to stop doing boring and repetitive tasks, which increased developer happiness. It helped guarantee that all PRs have a proper description so QAs and reviewers understand the PR's goal, mitigating the back-and-forth conversations, especially for the QA team. It also allowed Decipad to ensure all PRs follow the same rules set.
The Impact of Reviewpad in Decipad PR Process:
“Reviewpad has been really helpful and saved me (and my team's) time: we no longer have to worry about generating detailed descriptions or manually adding labels to our pull requests. Really great!”
Marta Fernandes
Senior Software Engineer
