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Managing code review settings for your team

You can decrease noise for your team by limiting notifications when your team is requested to review a pull request.

Who can use this feature

Team maintainers and organization owners can configure code review settings.

Code review settings are available in all public repositories owned by an organization, and all private repositories owned by organizations on GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Server 2.20+, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information, see "GitHub's products."

About code review settings

When you enable auto assignment, any time your team has been requested to review a pull request, the team is removed as a reviewer and a specified subset of team members are assigned in the team's place. Code review assignments allow you to decide whether the whole team or just a subset of team members are notified when a team is requested for review.

When code owners are automatically requested for review, the team is still removed and replaced with individuals unless a branch protection rule is configured to require review from code owners. If such a branch protection rule is in place, the team request cannot be removed and so the individual request will appear in addition.

Routing algorithms

Code review assignments automatically choose and assign reviewers based on one of two possible algorithms.

The round robin algorithm chooses reviewers based on who's received the least recent review request, focusing on alternating between all members of the team regardless of the number of outstanding reviews they currently have.

The load balance algorithm chooses reviewers based on each member's total number of recent review requests and considers the number of outstanding reviews for each member. The load balance algorithm tries to ensure that each team member reviews an equal number of pull requests in any 30 day period.

Any team members that have set their status to "Busy" will not be selected for review. If all team members are busy, the pull request will remain assigned to the team itself. For more information about user statuses, see "Setting a status."

Configuring auto assignment

  1. In the top right corner of GitHub Enterprise Server, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations. Your organizations in the profile menu

  2. Click the name of your organization. Organization name in list of organizations

  3. Under your organization name, click Teams.

    Teams tab

  4. On the Teams tab, click the name of the team. List of the organization's teams

  5. At the top of the team page, click Settings. Team settings tab

  6. In the left sidebar, click Code review Code review button

  7. Select Enable auto assignment. Auto-assignment button

  8. Under "How many team members should be assigned to review?", use the drop-down menu and choose a number of reviewers to be assigned to each pull request. Number of reviewers dropdown

  9. Under "Routing algorithm", use the drop-down menu and choose which algorithm you'd like to use. For more information, see "Routing algorithms." Routing algorithm dropdown

  10. Optionally, to always skip certain members of the team, select Never assign certain team members. Then, select one or more team members you'd like to always skip. Never assign certain team members checkbox and dropdown

  11. Optionally, to only notify the team members chosen by code review assignment for each pull review request, under "Notifications" select If assigning team members, don't notify the entire team.

  12. Optionally, to include members of child teams as potential reviewers when assigning requests, select Child team members.

  13. Optionally, to count any members whose review has already been requested against the total number of members to assign, select Count existing requests.

  14. Optionally, to remove the review request from the team when assigning team members, select Team review request.

  15. Click Save changes.

Disabling auto assignment

  1. In the top right corner of GitHub Enterprise Server, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations. Your organizations in the profile menu

  2. Click the name of your organization. Organization name in list of organizations

  3. Under your organization name, click Teams.

    Teams tab

  4. On the Teams tab, click the name of the team. List of the organization's teams

  5. At the top of the team page, click Settings. Team settings tab

  6. Select Enable auto assignment to remove the checkmark. Code review assignment button

  7. Click Save changes.