Comment by vlovich123

I’m confused. How do you do frequent small changes and avoid stacked PRs. Do you just do a small commit, wait for a review, merge, do another small commit? Or do you make a bunch of small commits locally and only put up the next one for review when the previous one is reviewed and merged?

That’s the only models I can think of and it’s weird to advocate to have a variable time asynchronous process in the middle of your code or review loops. Seems like you’re just handicapping your velocity for no reason.

Stacked PRs are precisely about factoring out small changes into individually reviewable commits that can be reviewed and landed independently, decoupling reviewer and developer while retaining good properties like small commits that the reviewer is going to do a better job on, larger single purpose commits that the reviewer knows to spend more time on without getting overwhelmed dealing with unrelated noise, and the ability to see relationships between smaller commits and the bigger picture. Meanwhile the developer gets to land unobtrusive cleanups that serve a broader goal faster to avoid merge conflicts while getting feedback quicker on work while working towards a larger goal.

The only time stacked commits aren’t as useful is for junior devs who cants organize themselves well enough to understand how to do this well (it’s an art you have to intentionally practice at) and don’t generally have a good handle on the broader scope of what they’re working towards.