Vital x Reviewpad Case Study

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How Vital Improved Their Review Process

Who‘s Vital

Vital is a B2B SaaS company that provides a single API for health and fitness data. They do this by abstracting the countless health and fitness providers out there (e.g. Strava, Fitbit, Apple HealthKit). They also provide a Lab Testing API. With a single call their customers are able to order lab tests to their end-users.

Challenges

GitHub‘s built-in tools were not reliable

The workload was not equally distributed, and the same user was often being assigned to. That person was spending most of their time reviewing code, since, in the past, they were one of the biggest contributors to the codebase.
Code ownership is not flexible enough. Vital has one of two engineers always reviewing code in a particular folder while making sure another engineer (from a different team) is randomly picked to do the review. This makes sure that code in a particular folder is:

Reviewed by someone that has a lot of context;
Reviewed by someone else that has none.

Labelling PRs

It is also an important component on how engineers at Vital do code reviews. It provides context (e.g. “PR ready for review”, “Trivial”, “Urgent”) and it allows people to focus their review time on the right things.

Enforce certain team rules

Make sure a test is added when opening a PR. This is achieved by checking (on each PR) if a new file or modification happened on the /tests folder. If this doesn‘t happen, the PR won‘t pass the CI checks.

Solution

Thanks to Reviewpad $hasFilePattern, $assignReviewer, $addLabel, $matchString and $error built-in, Vital was able to:

Define rules on specific files and folders and assign the right people to review and label PRs that touch those;
Enforce testing on each PR;
Assign reviewers based on their review workload;
Bypass the rules in special cases. For example, when changing documentation.

Conclusion

To Vital, Reviewpad automated boring and repetitive tasks that were happening on every PR.

The Impact of Reviewpad in Vital PR Process:

“Half a decade ago when I was managing a team of 25, I dreamed of a tool like Reviewpad. Pull Requests automation and verification was and still is paramount. Simple things like assigning reviewers and verifying that a PR has a ticket are basic necessities. Assigning specific people if a certain part of the code is touched is something people already do manually. Reviewpad automates that and a lot more. A must-have for any team building.”