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Software Engineering vocabulary · Version Control

Pull request

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈpʊl rɪˌkwest/nounCore term

In software engineering, pull request means: A request to merge your code changes from one branch into another, so that teammates can review and discuss them first.

In Turkish: çekme isteği, birleştirme isteği

How it is used

Used every day on GitHub, Bitbucket and similar platforms. You open, review, approve and merge a pull request; people usually shorten it to PR. A 'draft PR' is not ready for full review yet.

Example sentences

  1. I opened a pull request for the login fix. Can you take a look before lunch?

  2. Please keep pull requests small; a 2,000-line diff is hard to review.

  3. The pull request was merged after two approvals.

Common collocations

  • open a pull request
  • review a pull request
  • merge a pull request
  • draft pull request
  • code reviewThe practice of teammates reading and commenting on each other's code changes before they are merged, to catch problems and share knowledge.
  • mergeTo combine the changes from one branch into another, so that both sets of work end up in the same code.
  • branchA separate line of development in a repository, where you can work on changes without affecting the main code until you are ready to merge.
  • commitA saved snapshot of changes in a repository, with a short message that explains what was changed and why. Also used as a verb: to commit your changes.
  • LGTMShort for 'looks good to me': a quick written comment a reviewer leaves to say that a code change is fine and can be merged.

More terms: Version Control

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