Pull request description generation automates the creation of helpful descriptions of your changes and creates useful context for PR reviewers. By analysing your changes and utilising large language models (LLMs), this feature helps you craft clear, informative pull request descriptions quickly and efficiently.
What is PR Description Generation?
When you create a pull request in Gearset using Continuous Deployment or Pipelines, you'll see an option to generate a description. We'll analyze the changes in your Git diff - that's the lines you've added, modified, or deleted in the pull request - and suggest a description based on a best-practice template. You can then easily review and edit this content to make sure it accurately reflects your changes.
Note: This tool looks at what has changed in order to generate a useful description, however that description should be reviewed in order to ensure it covers the intent of the change.
Why is this needed?
Crafting good pull request descriptions can be challenging, especially with complex Salesforce changes. We often see teams encounter several pain points:
XML complexity: The intricate nature of XML changes can make them difficult to describe, sometimes leading to changes being "rubber-stamped" rather than receiving a thorough review.
Change impact confusion: Users, particularly those who are less technical, may struggle to articulate the impact of their changes, hindering effective review.
Weak descriptions: Many pull requests lack sufficient detail, which moves the responsibility to the reviewer to decipher what has changed and the intent of the update.
Tool hopping & low VCS confidence: Switching between tools and a lack of familiarity with Git can negatively impact pull request quality.
Our text generation feature helps address these challenges by:
Explaining changes: Analysing the changes to help you articulate your work clearly and concisely.
Promoting best practice: Our suggestions use a structured template that encourages meaningful reviews, including details on impact and suggested testing.
Informing reviewers: Providing better context for reviewers to scrutinise changes effectively.
Who can use it?
Pull request description generation is available to everyone across all Gearset Deployment and Automation tiers, providing you agree with our terms and conditions relating to usage of AI.
How can I enable it?
To enable this feature for your team, a team owner must agree to Gearset's AI terms of use. Any team owner can do this, and once enabled, the entire team will have access to the feature. Similarly, only team owners can disable the feature through the same settings page.
For teams with fixed terms in their Gearset contract:
At present, teams with fixed terms will not see the option to enable or disable this feature in their settings. If your team has specific legal concerns and wishes to prevent the use of text generation features, please contact our support team, and we will assist you.
What information is sent for text generation?
We are committed to protecting your data - thus, we don't allow third party companies to train on your data.
For more information, read our AI terms and conditions.
When generating your pull request description, we only send the changes made in the branch – specifically, the lines added, modified, or deleted in the pull request – to the large language model (LLM).
No other user data or metadata from your Salesforce orgs or Gearset account is sent for text generation. Please note, that the data we send may change in the future as we further develop this feature (see "What's next" section).
What's next?
We're constantly working to enhance our text generation capabilities and provide an even more seamless experience.
Better Responses
We'll be continuously refining our text generation mechanism based on your feedback. This means the length or even the template itself might evolve over time to deliver the most helpful and relevant descriptions. We genuinely want to hear what you think, whether it's good or bad, as your feedback will directly shape the future of this feature!
Deeper Context
Currently, our text generation uses the changes made in the pull request as the sole source of truth. We understand that this isn't always enough, especially for answering deeper questions like "Why was this change made?".
Many of you use ticketing systems like Jira or ADO, where the "what" and "why" of changes are often already documented. We're exploring ways to integrate with these systems to provide even richer context for your PR descriptions in the future.
Feedback or questions?
We encourage you to share any feedback or questions with us. The easiest way to do so is by clicking thumbs up/down button in the feedback modal which appears when you generate PR description.
Alternatively, you can reach out to our support team via the in-app chat or through our usual support channels.
We'd love to hear what you think!