microsoft / shortstack

Stacked Pull Request Tool

Introduction

ShortStack is a tool to transform the way you check in code so that you get more and better code reviews.
The typical developer will check in something large and painful at the end of a period of private feature development, but with ShortStack, it becomes easy to create small pull requests for each atomic piece of work you do to advance the feature. This allows you to get feedback EARLY, because you won't have to wait for code reviews, and it will make code reviews MORE EFFECTIVE because you can isolate logic changes from each other and from trivial changes such as boiler plate code.

Getting Started

To get started with the powershell script:

1. Clone short stack to you local drive: git clone https://github.com/microsoft/ShortStack.git [local folder path]
2. Enable custom scripts on your machine with this powershell command: Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
3. Install posh-git: PowerShellGet\Install-Module posh-git -Scope CurrentUser
4. Get a VSTS access token:
   1. Visit https://mscodehub.visualstudio.com/ShortStack/_git/ShortStack
   2. Click your user icon and click 'Security'
   3. Click on 'Add' to add a new token (make it active for a year)
   4. Click 'Create Token', then immediately copy the value displayed.
5. Edit your powershell profile with this command: notepad $profile. If prompted, create the file if it doesn't already exist and then add these lines:

Import-Module Posh-Git -Force
Import-Module c:\tools\shortstack\scripts\ShortStack.psm1 -Force
$VSTSPersonalAccessToken="(your VSTS personal access key)"

6. Close and re-open powershell to make sure your profile works. You should be able to type ss on the command line and see ShortStack Help.
7. In each repository, Create a default reviewers file:
   1. Create the file "stackprefs.txt" in your .git folder
   2. run Get-VSTSUserGuids to see the user id's of users in your repository
   3. for each reviewer you want to include, add this line: reviewerid=(vsts_guid_of_user) (lines starting with '#' are treated as comments)

Build and Test

Building and running the cmdlets:

1. Open .sln in Visual Studio 2019 or later

Contribute

Please feel free to fork your own repo and submit your work as a PR. We will code review and bring in changes that meet a high quality bar.

shortstack's Issues

Get-VSTSUserGuids could format its output in the manner stackprefs.txt desires

Get-VSTSUserGuids currently outputs the list of users like:

display name of user=(vsts_guid_of_user)

stackprefs.txt requires the following format:

reviewerid=(vsts_guid_of_user)

Aligning these would be very helpful for bootstrapping new repositories.

Various issues with opening URLs

1. This error shows up every time I ss push or ss finish. (The current use of Process::Start($url) to launch these URLs doesn't seem to be working as hoped.)

Do you wish to continue?
Type 'YES' to continue: : YES
Creating 'finish' branch...
Switched to branch 'users/jer/CleanUp_00'
Switched to branch 'users/jer/CleanUp_FINISH'
Completing pull request 6 CleanUp_01: Bye bye cruft
Creating new pull request ' Completion of CleanUp '
Created pull request with id:  7
ERROR:  Exception calling "Start" with "1" argument(s): "The system cannot find the file specified."

2. the govsts command is hard-wired to launch the version of Edge included with Windows. I prefer Edge Dev, but we probably should launch the configured default browser.