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Yesterday, the team at GitHub announced that they have acquired Pull Panda for an undisclosed amount, to help teams create more efficient and effective code review workflows on GitHub.

Pull Panda helps thousands of teams to work together on the code and further helps in improving their process by combining three new apps including Pull Reminders, Pull Analytics, and Pull Assigner.

Pull Reminders: Users can get a prompt in Slack whenever a collaborator needs a review. It facilitates automatic reminders that ensures the pull requests aren’t missed.

Pull Analytics: Users can now get real-time insight and make data-driven improvements for creating a more transparent and accountable culture.

Pull Assigner: Users can automatically distribute code across their team such that no one gets overloaded and knowledge could be spread around.

Pull Panda helps the team to ship faster and gain insight into bottlenecks in the process. Abi Noda, the founder of Pull Panda highlighted the major reasons for starting Pull Panda. According to him, there were two major pain points, the first one was that on fast moving teams, usually pull requests are forgotten which causes delays in the code reviews and eventually delays in shipping new features to the customers.

Abi Noda stated in a video, “I started Pull Panda to solve two major pain points that I had as an engineer and manager at several different companies. The first problem was that on fast moving teams, pull requests easily are forgotten about and often slip through the cracks. This leads to frustrating delays in code reviews and also means it takes longer to actually ship new features to your customers.”

The team built Pull Reminders which is a GitHub app that automatically notifies the team about their code reviews, to solve the above mentioned problem.

The second problem was that it was difficult to measure and understand the team’s development process for identifying bottlenecks. To solve this issue, the team built Pull Analytics to provide real-time insights into the software development process. It also highlights the current code review workload across the team such that the team knows who is overloaded and who might be available.

Also, a lot of customers have discovered that the majority of their code reviews were done by the same set of people on the team. For solving this problem,  the team built Pull Assigner that offers two algorithms for automatically assigning reviewers. First is the Load Balance, which equalizes the number of reviews so everyone on the team does the same number of reviews. The second one is the round robin algorithm that randomly assigns additional reviewers such that knowledge can be spread across the team.

Nat Friedman, CEO at GitHub said, “We’ll be integrating everything Abi showed you directly into GitHub over the coming months. But if you’re impatient, and you want to get started now, I’m happy to announce that all three of the Pull Panda products are available for free in the GitHub marketplace starting today. So we hope you enjoy using Pull Panda and we look forward to your feedback. Goodbye. It’s over.”

Pull Panda will no longer offer the Enterprise plan. Existing customers of Enterprise plans can continue to use their on-premises offering. All paid subscriptions have been converted to free subscriptions. New users can install Pull Panda for their organizations for free at our website or GitHub Marketplace.

The official GitHub blog post reads, “We plan to integrate these features into GitHub but hope you’ll start benefiting from them right away. We’d love to hear what you think as we continue to improve how developers work together on GitHub.”

To know more about this news, check out GitHub’s post.

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Amrata Joshi