Microsoft acquired one more company, adding to its long list of acquisitions that already goes over 200 companies. This time it was Pull Panda.

Pull Panda is a set of tools to help software development be more efficient. More precisely consists of the following tools:

  • Pull Reminders: allows a developer to notify other developers that he needs a code review. The notifications are automatically reminded on Slack so that no code review is ever forgotten.
  • Pull Analytics: gives you statistics for wait times, top contributors, team effectiveness and so on. Basically an overview of how the development is proceeding.
  • Pull Assigner: automatically distributes code review requests equally to every developer.

The Pull Panda team made a small video explaining it all:

So the idea is to improve the code review workflow on GitHub. All of these tools are available for free in the marketplace and will eventually be integrated into GitHub.

The tools are certainly nice and no one can complain about the price. According Pull Panda these were some pains he experienced and I can see why. It’s fairly easy to forget about code reviews or to have a one man army code reviewer. The analytics tool should perhaps be used wisely. There’s definitely some potential to create internal conflicts. Either way, good for Microsoft, GitHub and Pull Panda.