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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

But you still have to test the actual functionality, don't you? What if the author makes a gif of clicking a button, but doesn't record if the browser back button still works?

I'd think that for frontend, you'd have CI/CD pipeline that deploys the code into a staging server, where I can test it myself.

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Code review != Testing.

A lot of people conflate these IMHO. Code review should not really be about whether it "works" or not. That's what tests are for.

Code reviews are about checking for code complexity, good use of abstractions, readability, etc.

What's the point of checking for those if the bar for fully functional isn't met?

None. So don't do the review until CI passes.

this should be the most upvoted comment

And also to spread knowledge of aspects of the system across the team.

You have to review tests and you are back at square one.

I remember a few companies ago we had a system that would deploy every branch to a separate subdomain (same name as the PR) that you could access. It was fantastically useful for just seeing what the deployed code would look like. I think (for UI things at least) this is a very reasonable solution.

Wish I could remember the github service that did this?

Vercel and Netlify do PR reviews these days. Was it in the JS space?

I think render.com is going to I introduce this soon too.

There is already Vercel, Netlify, etc. that support this feature.

You can also easily do your own version with Cloudfront and S3 or just a custom nginx config.

the neame is review app, it's on heroku since forever, also in gitlab ops today.

Isn't this what automated tests are for? Manually testing every change is a huge burden, requires most of the automation necessary for automated testing (from the infrastructure point of view), and actually discourages people from writing automated tests.

It's interesting that you brought up the issue of back button. It is indeed an area where bugs frequently occur.

I haven't found a good solution except manually asking in every MR that I sense a potential issue. Maybe it is a good idea to have it in MR template as a checklist item.

Another problem with back button is that the expected behaviour is usually missing in the design or requirements to begin with, requiring a lot of back-and-forth on what's actually expected (especially for SPA).

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