The what, why, and how of pull requests and source comments
Microsoft veteran on knowing the difference and convincing approvers to accept a change
Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has weighed in on the difference between a pull request description and comments embedded in the code.
Both matter, but they serve very different purposes. As Chen noted on his The Old New Thing dev blog: "The PR description is a point-in-time statement, providing information that is relevant to the code review itself.
"It is an exercise in persuasive writing: You are trying to convince the approver that your change should be accepted."
And sticking text in the source? "Comments in the code are for talking about the code itself. What is the correct way to call this function? Does it have specific prerequisites? This information is durable: It is information that remains useful even after the pull request completes."
We'd argue that commit messages should be considered as well, but the...
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