Pull Requests vs Continuous Integration: Reducing Delays and Improving Code Review Practices

GitHub introduced Pull Request (PR) practices to make it easier for open‑source projects to accept contributions from untrusted external submitters, allowing committers to review and merge changes as a single unit.

Although PRs aim to simplify external contributions, many teams now use them for internal changes, treating them as a default "best practice" despite the performance cost in delivery time and quality.

The article advocates using Continuous Integration (CI) instead of PRs, emphasizing short feedback loops: changes are integrated and tested frequently, ideally within minutes, allowing developers to discover conflicts early and maintain a healthy codebase.

PRs introduce delays because code must wait for human review before integration; even fast reviews can add 30‑40 minutes of latency, and most teams cannot reliably resolve PRs within 30 minutes, leading to workflow interruptions.

Effective CI builds should provide feedback within ten minutes, enabling developers to continue working without waiting for reviews. While some review is still needed, faster cycles allow multiple changes to be submitted, integrated, and tested before a formal review.

The article suggests alternative review practices that avoid disrupting CI feedback cycles: pair programming (instant feedback), regular scheduled reviews (e.g., weekly), and pipeline approvals placed after integration and automated testing.

In conclusion, PRs require manual code review before merging, delaying automated test feedback, whereas CI‑driven workflows either review code during writing (pair programming) or after integration, enabling more frequent, smaller commits and higher overall quality.