CASE 165 · NAUTILUS · 2023
PR review meta-work, off the engineers’ plate.
An adtech company’s PR review process was 30% mechanical — checking that the right reviewers were assigned, that the CI passed, that the description mentioned a JIRA ticket. The other 70% was the actual review. We automated the mechanical part.
Adtech
PLATFORM
2023
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
MECHANICAL REVIEW STEPS
AUTOMATED
REVIEWER ASSIGNMENT
AUTO
TIME-TO-FIRST-REVIEW
−54%
COMMENT NOISE
−71%
HOW IT WENT
The 30% mechanical portion of PR review was where the friction concentrated. Reviewers spent attention on whether the PR had a ticket reference instead of on whether the code change was right. Junior engineers felt the friction the most — they’d open a PR and get a dozen comments before anyone looked at the diff.
GitHub Actions workflows ran the mechanical checks: required JIRA reference, automatic label assignment based on changed paths, automatic reviewer assignment based on CODEOWNERS and recent committers, automated draft-to-ready transitions when checks passed.
Mechanical review steps dropped to zero engineer-time. Time-to-first-review fell 54%. Comment noise dropped 71% as the bots handled what reviewers used to ping for. Junior engineers reported the experience as less stressful in the quarterly survey.
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