Axolo: GitHub Slack integration

Sydney Cohen — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 03:22:41 +0000

Streamline your code review process

Axolo is a tool that has been developed for and by developers to help streamline their code review process and ease discussion around pull requests.

While working as developers in tech teams for more than 10 years we've experimented three majors problems that you are probably also experimenting if you are looking for a GitHub-Slack integration.

Problems to be solved via a GitHub Slack integration

1. Time to review is too long

Getting your pull requests reviewed too long after you submit it creates bottleneck in your software development process and is demoralising for developers. Having to come back on a work you did 4 days ago is not only frustrating but also inefficient. It can break the developer's focus and disrupt their workflow, resulting in a loss of productivity.

2. Pull request Conflicts

If pull requests are left open for too long, the probability of conflicts increases, as other developers may be making changes to the same codebase. Resolving these conflicts can be time-consuming and may require additional work to ensure that the code works as intended.

3. Notification fatigue

Too many notifications can lead to 1. feeling overwhelmed and distracted, making it difficult for developers to focus on their work.
and 2. having to switch them off completely and ignore them, which can be detrimental to your team productivity.

Cost of developer coordination

Developers waste a minimum of 2 hours per week coordinating each other. For a team of 20 engineers this represent the a 120k$ for a year.

Alternatives:

Before using Axolo our customers usually are trying out alternatives such as:

In House bot
Slack GitHub official integration or other single channel bots.

Those two alternatives have usually critical problems:

Noisy - Alerts everyone and then gets ignored
Miss critical info: deployments, GitHub Actions, and checks.
Hard to maintain, or not up to date for your development purposes.

Axolo:

Why we do it:

The motivation behind Axolo is to help engineering teams resolve pull requests faster and engage more around the code. We believe that:

stale pull requests are detrimental to developer productivity and the faster they are merged the faster one can focus on a new task ahead,
the more a team is engaging with each other's code, the easier it is to make everyone agree and find solutions,
good communication is essential to developer productivity and well-being.

What we do:

Axolo opens a temporary Slack channel for every GitHub pull request or GitLab merge request. It will invite the author and its reviewers to the channel, notify them of relevant events like code comments, GitHub Actions, Deployments, PR checks or GitLab CI/CD. Then, Axolo will archive the channel once you close or merge the pull request.

How we do it:

Axolo listen to all events from GitHub (pull requests, CI/CD, code comments, issue comments, edit, delete etc) and then digest them to create channels and comments in Slack with the appropriate markup. Axolo also listens to Slack events to mirror them on GitHub so that all your pull requests discussions are documented.

On top of that Axolo requires every team member who is onboarded to authenticate with their Slack and GitHub account. This allows Axolo to reduce notifications whenever a user makes an action from GitHub to Slack and vice versa. As we use the user Slack token for a specific user, we can write on his name and perform actions that any other bot would notify you for.

Not convinced yet? Read reviews from engineers reviewing code every day on: https://www.g2.com/products/axolo/reviews

Trying out Axolo

The best way to start using Axolo is to onboard a few teams on the tool and see how it works out for them.
You have a two week trial with all the functionality to see if Axolo is the right tool for you => Try our GitHub GitLab Slack integration out here and let us know how it worked out for you.

Forem: Sydney Cohen