Power Automate: How to Add GitHub Reviewers Efficiently

In this blog post, software developer or team lead Michael addresses the challenges faced during the review process of GitHub pull requests. Highlighting the complexity of managing and delegating reviewers correctly, the author introduces the audience to Power Automate as a solution for alleviating time-consuming tasks.

The author explains how Power Automate can automate the addition of GitHub reviewers and streamline the review process. He provides an example describing how work items marked as critical require an additional expert reviewer vouched by another team.

Michael proceeds to delve into the benefits of automating the process, how it aids in avoiding manual errors, saving time, and ensuring all necessary reviews are completed before merging a pull request. For more information on this, please click here.

The use of Power Automate is further elaborated on, with Michael explaining how its interfacing with Github enables auto-addition of reviewers. The post even walks us through translating the initial manual process into a Power Automate flow with API calls.

The author further expounds on the trigger within Power Automate which, when configured correctly, allows it to respond to created pull requests.

Another element involved in the automation process is the collection of information from the backlog via serverless AWS Lambda functions. These are crucial in identifying suitable additional reviewers. The post then notes how the serverless Lambda function retrieves backlog info directly from Atlassian Jira, and AWS API Gateway provides a URL for Power Automate to call using an HTTP request.

Although you cannot use a standard action to assign reviewers on your GitHub pull request, it's possible to request reviewers from the GitHub REST API.

The author goes on to demonstrate calculations performed before reviewers from the previous action are added to the pull request and explains the exclusion of the pull request owner.

Concluding, Michael stresses the importance of automating the process of adding GitHub reviewers with Power Automate for a consistent workflow across various technologies, provided APIs are accessible.

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Elucidation of the Topic

Power Automate, formerly known as Microsoft Flow, is a powerful tool designed to automate tasks and streamline workflows across various business tools and technologies. This Microsoft 365 service allows businesses and individuals to create automated processes known as flows. These flows are triggered by specific events, and can range from simple, single-step tasks to complex, multi-step procedures.

Specifically in software development, code reviewing is an important part of software quality assurance. And when integrated with GitHub, the popular code hosting platform, Power Automate helps to modernize and automate the process of assigning reviewers, thus mitigating errors associated with manual work.

Consequently, Power Automate proves to be a highly valuable resource in business process automation, contributing to more efficient workflows.

Read the full article Adding GitHub Reviewers with Power Automate

Learn about Adding GitHub Reviewers with Power Automate

The acquisition of the know-how on how to leverage workflow automation, specifically the robust automation tool, Power Automate, to simplify the assignment of reviewers on GitHub is a skill of vital importance to developers and team leads. This blog post singularity focuses on teaching you how to actualize task automation for your pull requests on GitHub.

Delineating the Problem: A time consuming task for many software developers or team leads is the management and assignment of reviewers for the GitHub pull requests. This task can become overwhelming given a large team or multiple projects to manage. An advanced tool for streamlining workflows, Power Automate, provides a suitable solution for managing and automating this task. It increases the efficiency of the code review process by automatically adding GitHub reviewers.

Understanding the Solution: When you establish a pull request in GitHub, it is important to ensure that all assigned work items have undergone review. Under normal circumstances, the pull requests are reviewed by a dedicated team. However, there are instances where special attention is required particularly for critical work items. Such items, often marked as critical using a tag or label, necessitates review by additional experts. By automating the process, you not only save time but also mitigate the risk of manual errors.

Instantiating the Solution: Activating Power Automate, allows for ease in the automatic addition of GitHub reviewers. This is implemented through a trigger which reacts to newly-created pull requests. The commands you issue can review all assigned work items for special tags. Once the work items are marked as critical reviews, the automation flow adds the required reviewers, ultimately enhancing the efficiency of the review process. This blog post will guide you on how to convert your initial process into a Power Automate flow, a process that includes executing new API calls.

Exploring GitHub Triggers: Now, let's delve into the triggers within Power Automate. Upon installing the trigger, the parameters of the trigger would require configuration for optimal performance. GRM GitHub Owner and GRM GitHub Repository variables can be configured to your demo repository in GitHub. A trigger test is also simplified by using a Scope as an action.

Supercharging the Solution: The next step in this journey to automation is to retrieve your Pull Request from GitHub. Keeping it simple, you can utilize information provided by your flow trigger as parameters for your newly added action. The main goal of using the automation tool is to identify additional reviewers. To do this, a serverless AWS Lambda function is used that fetches all the required reviewers for a GitHub pull request.

Engaging GitHub’s REST API: Finally, one interacts with GitHub's REST API to request a list of reviewers to be added to the pull request. By using the HTTP Request action in Power Automate and calculating reviewers as parameters, the automation process can be completed successfully.

Resolution: This training blog post should leave you with an understanding of how to simplify the addition of GitHub reviewers. It reduces potential errors experienced when manually adding these reviewers. This automation process fits the unique needs of your development process while being versatile across different technological tools.

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