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Every team has guardrails, whether you recognize them or not. They’re a form of automation that can have significant impact on your software development process and the people doing the work. They’re another way to give toil the boot and keep developers in the flow. We’ve made the case for engineering automation in a previous article; here’s how guardrails as automations ensure that agreed upon boundaries and ways of working are codified into team processes.

A pull request (PR) is (quite literally) a request to pull a change into a project’s code or documentation. It is a popular change management process supported by many VCS providers including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, and others. Typically these come with features to track open pull requests, tools to assist in reviewing the changes, the ability to approve—or reject—PRs, and finally to merge approved PRs.

When you survey developers on how to improve engineering practices and their daily job experience, their answers invariably include getting rid of little annoying things - what's called toil. Toil is manual and repetitive tasks that waste your time. Toil is arguably worse than crisis, because a crisis is temporary and firefighting can feel rewarding when it's over. Toil is more like a death march - an insidious force that eventually leads to burnout.