Accelerating pull requests in your company with GitHub Copilot

Understand features, enable developers, and measure Copilot's impact.

谁可以使用此功能？

GitHub Copilot Business or GitHub Copilot Enterprise

本文内容

本指南的灵感来自 GitHub 的工程系统成功 playbook (ESSP)，其中推荐了推动工程系统改进的策略和指标。

如果你要启动 Copilot 的推出，我们建议定义目标、相应地规划推出，并向员工明确传达目标。 请参阅“使用 GitHub Copilot 实现公司工程目标”。

1. Identify barriers to success

ESSP 建议的第一步是充分了解阻碍公司取得进步的障碍。 通过了解当前的基线、所需的未来状态以及阻碍进步的障碍，可确保更改具有针对性且有效。

Teams often experience delays in merging pull requests due to lengthy review cycles. These delays often stem from:

  • Complex code changes that are difficult to understand
  • Inconsistent code formatting that makes reviews challenging
  • A general lack of context provided with the changes
  • Social factors that contribute to slow or hard-to-address reviews

Reviewers can also easily miss small errors that may lead to production issues.

This leads to bottlenecks in the development process and slows down the overall delivery and quality of features.

2. Evaluate your options

下一步是评估并商定解决方案，以解决在第一步中确定的障碍。 在本指南中，我们将重点关注 GitHub Copilot 对已确定目标的影响。 请记住，新工具的成功推出还需要文化和流程的变更。

你将与试点小组一起试用新工具和流程，以收集反馈并衡量成功与否。 有关试用期间使用的培训资源和指标，可提前查看 3.实施变更和要监视的指标部分。

Sign up for Copilot

How Copilot can help

GitHub Copilot offers a suite of features designed to accelerate the pull request review process, enhance code quality, and improve collaboration, ultimately leading to faster merge times.

By leveraging Copilot's capabilities, teams can streamline their workflows, reduce friction, and ensure consistent, high-quality code.

Generates complete and helpful PR summaries

Copilot can automatically generate clear and concise PR summaries, saving developers time and ensuring that the purpose and changes of the PR are easily understood by reviewers. This reduces the likelihood of misunderstandings and speeds up the review process.

Assists reviewers during their review process

GitHub Copilot can be used as a powerful PR review companion.

  • Copilot can help explain complex code changes so that reviewers more quickly understand what the PR is contributing.
  • Copilot can provide repository-wide, context-aware suggestions and potential code improvements directly within the pull request review interface on GitHub, helping reviewers catch potential issues and offer constructive feedback more efficiently.
  • Copilot can help reviewers draft and write clear, consistent, and effective review comments.

Reviews based on organization guidelines

  • Copilot can review code changes in your IDE before opening a pull request, or be assigned as reviewer to a pull request.
  • With rulesets, you can set up Copilot to systematically review pull requests based on custom criteria.
  • With coding guidelines for reviews (Copilot Enterprise only), Copilot can enforce organizational coding standards and best practices, automatically flagging potential violations and suggesting fixes.

These features ensure consistency across the codebase and help you catch errors early in the development process, reducing the need for manual code reviews and saving time for developers and reviewers.

Suggests code fixes

Based on a pull request review comment, Copilot can help pull request authors quickly implement the required code changes to resolve the review.

Cultural considerations

在推出 GitHub Copilot 的同时，还应解决任何可能阻碍目标实现的社会或文化因素。

以下示例取自 ESSP 中的“反模式”部分。

  • Teams might wait too long to release, deploying large batches of code at once. This could be caused by a fear of destabilization with frequent releases, a lack of CI/CD pipeline maturity, or strict compliance requirements.
  • Developers might spend too long perfecting code or adding unnecessary features. This could be caused by a culture of perfectionism or a lack of effective prioritization.
  • Developers might build overly complex solutions for simple problems. This could be caused by a desire to future-proof unnecessarily, or pressure to add value through complexity.

3. Implement changes

确定克服障碍的正确方法后，可缩放已确定的解决方案。 要成功推出新工具或新流程，请务必为推出的每个部分指定负责人、就目标进行透明沟通、提供有效的培训并衡量成果。

本部分为开发人员提供了示例场景、最佳做法和资源。 我们建议使用本部分来规划沟通和培训课程，以帮助员工以符合目标的方式使用 Copilot。****

Create helpful pull request summaries

  1. When creating a pull request, click the Copilot icon in the "Add a description" field, then click Summary.
  2. Copilot will scan through the pull request and provide an overview of the changes made in prose, as well as a bulleted list of changes with the files that they impact.
  3. Check you're happy with Copilot's description.
  4. When reviewers come to your pull request, they'll have all the context they need to leave a review.

Use Copilot as a review assistant

When jumping into a pull request as a reviewer, you can use Copilot to speed up your review.

  1. Use Copilot to understand the changes in the pull request.

    • Ask Copilot to summarize the changes made to a file, particularly helpful for longer diffs. You can pick a specific file from the diff by clicking on the top-right corner of the file.

      Screenshot of a pull request "files changed" tab. The "Ask Copilot about this diff" option is highlighted in red.

    • For changes in specific lines, highlight the lines you want to better understand and ask Copilot to explain the changes to you. You can highlight a set of lines by clicking on the uppermost line number first, holding your SHIFT key, and then clicking on the lowermost line of the diff.

      Screenshot of a pull request "files changed" tab. A selection of lines is highlighted and an "Explain" option is displayed in a dropdown.

  2. Collaborate on your PR review with Copilot. Don't forget to attach the specific file diffs to the conversation before prompting Copilot.

    • You can ask Copilot for its own opinion on the PR changes by asking: Provide your judgement as a PR Reviewer, both for functional and non-functional aspects that these changes bring. Note how this prompt asks Copilot to consider both functional and non-functional aspects of the code.

    • For your own PR review comments, ask Copilot for a second opinion: As my peer reviewer on this pull request, give me your feedback on my own review: YOUR-REVIEW-COMMENT. Do you think it's pertinent? Am I missing something?

  3. Collaborate with Copilot to draft and refine your review comments.

    • After planning the review with Copilot, you can ask to list the comments that you should provide: Make a list of review comments to add to the PR and tell me exactly in which file diff and lines each comment should be added.
    • You can also ask Copilot to create a first draft of a review comment you have in mind or refine a comment before you post it: Help me draft review comments as discussed or Refine this review comment to make it clear, concise, and actionable.

Add Copilot as a reviewer

To reduce review times and merge pull requests faster, use Copilot code reviews systematically: first in the IDE before opening the pull request, then on the PR in GitHub.

Using Copilot code review does not replace the need for human code review. However, following the steps above can help humans complete their reviews faster.

  • Developers should request a review of all their changes using Copilot code review before opening a pull request.
  • Administrators should set up repository or organization rulesets to automatically add Copilot as a reviewer on any pull request targeting protected branches.
  • Team leads should capture their team's standard style and rules and set them as coding guidelines for the organization so that Copilot can leverage them in reviews.
    • Ensure your coding guidelines capture a minimum set of styling recommendations that make code more readable, which will help during the pull request review process.
    • To reduce the amount of PR review comments due to styling issues, set the same recommendations in Copilot instructions at the repository and organization level. This way, the code generated by Copilot will conform to these guidelines.

Get help implementing review comments

Pull request authors can speed up resolution of PR review comments by quickly implementing fixes with Copilot's assistance.

  • For any review comments left by Copilot itself, either commit the proposed fix directly, or edit it in Copilot Workspace before committing.
  • For any review comments left by peers, navigate to the file diff related to the PR review comment and attach the diff to a Copilot Chat conversation. Then, copy paste the review comment with a prompt like this: Suggest a fix for this review comment:
  • If you are using VS Code, ask GitHub Copilot in agent mode to implement the required changes from the review comment.

Best practices for developers

Developers should:

  • Request Copilot's review in your IDE before pushing to catch and resolve issues early.
  • Use Copilot to plan and refine your own PR review comments to help PR authors understand and resolve issues.
  • Attach relevant diff context, including specific lines of code, to your conversations with Copilot.

Developers should not:

  • Apply Copilot's suggestions without testing.
  • Rely solely on Copilot for reviews.
  • Neglect code readability.

Resources

Metrics to watch

若要评估新工具的试用情况，并确保全面推出后提供一致的改进，应监视结果并在需要时进行调整。 一般来说，建议考虑质量、速度和开发人员满意度这三大关键领域，并评估这些领域如何协同作用，共同推动业务成果的实现。****

下面是为评估 Copilot 对该特定目标的影响而建议查看的一些指标。

  • Developer satisfaction: Use developer surveys to measure satisfaction with engineering tooling.
  • Pull requests merged per developer: You can use GitHub's pull request webhook, ensuring action is closed and the merged property inside pull request object is true.
  • Pull requests lead time: Measure the average length of time between PR creation and merge.