Labs: Solving The Pull Request Problem w/ Continuous Merge

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
If I would ask a developer the same question, usually what they say to me is something like, a lot of my code changes are really, really simple. They're low risk, the size of my PR is small.
I'm an expert in this area. When I put up this PR, maybe a few days later, I just get an LGTM. Looks good to me. I shouldn't have to bother someone else to stop what they're doing, give this cursory review.
Two days later, give me an LGTM. Then I have to say, okay, this has been approved and merged. So it's like, let's get the really, really simple, low risk changes, although approved.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:43)
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the next episode in our LinearB Labs series, where we dive into the best research around the way devs work and the innovative ideas helping engineers spend less time on things like toil and more time on the craft of code. I'm Conor Bronsdon, executive producer and co-host of Dev Interrupted, and I'm joined today by two people that listeners will be very familiar with. First, we have Dev Interrupted's main host and LinearB co-founder, COO Dan Lines. Dan, great to have you on the side of the mic again.

**Dan Lines** (1:54)
Yeah, awesome to be on the show today.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:58)
And honestly, I'm just sad that we're not in person here. I really enjoyed the start of season one when I got to sit down with you and our other guest, LinearB's other co-founder and the company's CEO, Ori Keren, in person in Austin.
So I'm super stoked to have you both in Santa Monica for this conversation. Ori, great to have you back on the show.

**Ori Keren** (2:16)
Great to be here, Conor.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:18)
I really enjoyed the first episode of our LinearB Lab series where we dive deep into the data that we're finding with LinearB and the evaluation of the PR process and everything we're learning from it. And I think it has set the stage for this conversation where we say, great, you have CI, you have CD.
Lovely where everyone's getting these continuous integration, continuous deployment set up.
But you think the future of CI CD is actually CM CI CD. And if you're asking yourself in the audience, does that mean what I think it means? The answer is yes, it means continuous merge. But to understand why continuous merge CM is the future and why we think the entire DevOps industry will adopt CM as a best practice in the next few years, we have to understand how we got to where we are today and where that research came from. So let's take a look at why CI CD has become an industry standard and why the two of you started studying it. Ori, Dan, what brought you to begin to research CI CD and look at shifting the process left?

**Dan Lines** (3:19)
Yeah, this is, I was thinking about this between the two of us. And so I'm kind of thinking to myself, okay, why do we even have CI CD? And I know for you, when you started developing, there wasn't ages ago, it was like eons ago at this point.
There wasn't, I don't think there was a concept of CI CD. So why, like when you started, you know, what was everyone focused on? And then why was it, why did we need the CI CD thing?

**Ori Keren** (3:48)
Yeah, when I started working again, it was still even prior to the Azure Manifesto, I'm that old. So it was a waterfall kind of situation. You were planning the software, then building it, and QA-ing it, and deploying it. I don't know, it was like probably somewhere in the galaxy far, far away. Somebody else was like in charge of it. That's right. And yeah, the industry made a huge step progress in 2014, was when CI City started to be a thing, deployment.

**Dan Lines** (4:23)