Pull Assigner notifies all team members

[eborden]

What is happening

Pull Assigner notifies all team members when a review has been assigned.

What should happen

Only the team member that has review assigned from Pull Assigner should get notified.

Why

The amount of noise that team notifications produce makes Pull Assigner not worth the hassle. We want our signal to noise ratio to be low so engineers need only pay attention to the reviews that they are eventually assigned by Pull Assigner.

[abinoda]

@eborden Thanks for submitting this. Are you referring to Pull Reminders Slack notifications or email notifications?

[eborden]

Any notification 😄

[abinoda]

@eborden Ok, can you share your workflow? Are you manually assigning reviews to the team for Pull Assigner or automating it with CODEOWNER?

[eborden]

So far I've used manual assignment to the team as a test of the functionality.

[abinoda]

@eborden Got it. There's no way for us to stop GitHub's email notifications but we can definitely prevent Pull Reminders from sending notifications about the team review request, which I'm guessing is the far bigger pain point given the directness and noisiness of Slack notifications? Would this work?

[eborden]

@abinoda that may work, but it also provides a poor experience for team members who have not opted in to slack reminders and instead use email reminders. So we'd likely not utilize this tool.

[abinoda]

@eborden Makes sense. The problem you're describing is definitely legitimate.

The best solution I can think of would be to allow you to specify team members in Pull Assigner instead of on GitHub. So you'd create a team on GitHub with no members, then specify who the members are within Pull Assigner. This way you could assign a review to a GitHub team without GitHub notifying a bunch of people. If we implemented this do you think your team would use Pull Assigner?

I'd love to hear thoughts from other Pull Assigner users @jisung @marksb @brad-decker @nullren.

[eborden]

That sounds like a reasonable workaround.

[abinoda]

@eborden Another option would be for everyone to simply set up a gmail filter that mutes the team review request notifications. Would this work? I know it's a little inconvenient but it seems like it's less work overall than my previous suggestion.

We'd address the Slack notification issue on our end.

[eborden]

@abinoda it is possible that could work as well. It just seems like there is a flaw in the design if outside applications need to be configured in tandem to make this usable for teams.

[benmanns]

Dropping Slack notifications would be better than the status quo for us (everyone is already getting emailed with standard CODEOWNERS setup).

Internally we're somewhat particular about GitHub team setup, but could make this work. The way I'd probably do it is to create a pull_reminder_app_<team> team with no assignees and leave our <team> team set up, which would allow manual pings within other parts of GitHub.

[abinoda]

@eborden I agree that a Gmail filter isn't ideal but I think it might be the best solution for now.

I'm also considering the fact that the GitHub notifications for team review requests aren't always something folks will want to avoid. In certain cases I can see teams wanting everyone on the team to be made aware of new pull requests even though specific people will be assigned to actually review it.

For now we'll move forward with disabling team review request Slack notifications when the team is hooked up to Pull Assigner (cc: @benmanns), and for email suggest Gmail filtering:

We're working on launching improved documentation for Pull Assigner so will be sure to add this.

[nullren]

I quite like the idea of have a separate "pull reminders team" alias sort of thing. one issue that I've come across is that I actually can't assign a PR to my team anymore 😅 .

[abinoda]

@nullren

One issue that I've come across is that I actually can't assign a PR to my team anymore.

How come?