Code Owners

Yesterday, we shipped a new way to manage code review on GitHub. Now repository maintainers can define exactly which people and teams need to review projects using code owners.

This new feature automatically requests reviews from the code owners when a pull request changes any owned files.

I led the feature product strategy and design. Jared Pace was the engineer who built the feature into our app, and I worked on the markup and CSS for the feature.

I initially started with an exploration of how code owners could be defined in our protected branches repo setting, but ultimately we decided to keep the code owners data in the repository itself so that it could be versioned, and so PRs could be opened against it by anyone with write access to the repo (only repo admins have access to settings screens).

I also explored a rendered UI for the file, but we decided to ship without that for the initial iteration and explore that option in the future if it make sense depending on what we learn about how people use the feature.