GitHub Stacked PRs: A Practical Guide to Smaller, Faster Code Reviews
SMRTR summary
Large pull requests have long been the bane of software developers everywhere, burying reviewers in sprawling diffs with no clear entry point. GitHub's Stacked PRs feature offers a cleaner path forward, letting developers break one large change into a sequence of small, dependent pull requests, each reviewed independently.
The idea is straightforward: instead of one unwieldy PR, you build a chain. Foundational work, like database schema changes, goes in first. API layers come next. The user interface sits on top. Reviewers move through the stack from bottom to top, following the natural logic of the code.
The workflow relies on GitHub's command-line tool, and the extension handles the heavy lifting, cascading rebases when lower layers change and automatically retargeting upper layers after a merge.
The sweet spot, according to the workflow's guidelines, is two to five layers. As one best-practice note puts it, "Part 2 of 3: adds the API on top of the user model" is all it takes to orient a reviewer instantly.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Hacker Noon.
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