Pull Request Environments with Eric Silverman

The modern release workflow involves multiple stakeholders: engineers, management, designers, and product managers. It is a collaborative process that is often held together with brittle workflows. A developer deploys a new build to an ad hoc staging environment and pastes a link to that environment in Slack. Other stakeholders click on that link, then send messages to each other in Slack, or make comments on the pull request in GitHub.

This workflow is far from ideal. Collaborating around pull requests can be made easier with a dedicated set of tools for sharing and discussing those pull requests. This is the goal of FeaturePeek, a system for spinning up dedicated pull request environments, creating screenshots and comments, and reimagining the lifecycle of the release workflow.

Eric Silverman is a co-founder of FeaturePeek and he joins the show to discuss release management, the interactions between different stakeholders, and the development of his company. Much like the previous show about Postman, in which we explored how API management has become a ripe space for collaboration, the same is true of pull requests.