Martin Fowler

Pull Requests are a mechanism popularized by github, used to help facilitate merging of work, particularly in the context of open-source projects. A contributor works on their contribution in a fork (clone) of the central repository. Once their contribution is finished they create a pull request to notify the owner of the central repository that their work is ready to be merged into the mainline. Tooling supports and encourages code review of the contribution before accepting the request. Pull requests have become widely used in software development, but critics are concerned by the addition of integration friction which can prevent continuous integration.

Pull requests essentially provide convenient tooling for a development workflow that existed in many open-source projects, particularly those using a distributed source-control system (such as git). This workflow begins with a contributor creating a new logical branch, either by starting a new branch in the central repository, cloning

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