Preventing Pull Requests from Being Merged Without Proper Review

Code reviews are a critical safeguard for code quality. Even highly experienced developers can overlook issues after working on the same code for an extended period. A proper review introduces a fresh perspective that often uncovers problems missed during self-testing.

Skipping reviews for pull requests with a non-trivial number of code changes significantly increases the risk of defects, regressions, and production issues being introduced into the codebase.

Why merging pull requests without review is a problem

A thorough review process frequently identifies critical quality issues before code is deployed. When this step is skipped or reduced to a basic review:

Important defects may go unnoticed
Code quality and maintainability suffer
Delivery risk increases significantly
Problems are discovered later, when they are harder to fix

How to identify pull requests merged without review

Use the Git Activity view to find pull requests that were merged without an independent review.

In the LinearB side menu, select Metrics.
Select Git Activity.
Open the Pull Requests tab.
In the filters panel, select Merged w/o Review.
Review the matching pull requests in the table.

The Merged w/o Review filter shows pull requests merged without review during the selected period. LinearB considers a pull request unreviewed when it was merged without a review from someone other than its author.

Use the available filters to narrow the results by date, author, team, service, repository, or pull request label. Leave All Teams selected to review results across the organization.

Tip: Select a pull request in the table to investigate its review activity and open it in your Git provider when more detail is needed.

The PRs merged without review metric is also available in the Quality Metrics Report under the Metrics tab.

You can also build a custom metrics dashboard to track unreviewed merges by team or repository. Learn more about building custom metrics dashboards .

Get alerted when a pull request is merged without review

LinearB Goals can be used to alert your team whenever a pull request is merged without review. Alerts are delivered through the WorkerB app to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Learn how to connect WorkerB:

Team goal alerts can be configured to trigger:

Whenever any pull request is merged without review
Only when pull requests above a defined number of code changes are merged without review

Alerts include:

The number of code changes merged without review
The remaining allowed threshold before breaching the team goal
A direct link to the pull request that triggered the alert

Select the team you want to configure.
Click the gear icon and open Team Settings.
Navigate to the Goals tab.
Locate the Merge only reviewed requests goal and click Edit.
Set the acceptable threshold for code changes that can be merged without review.
Click the alert icon to enable Slack or Microsoft Teams notifications.

Ways to remediate unreviewed merges

To reduce the quality risk introduced by pull requests merged without review, consider one or more of the following actions.

Revert the pull request

Git allows pull requests to be reverted, restoring the base branch to its pre-merge state. The branch can then be reviewed properly before being merged again.

Retroactively review the changes

Even after a pull request is merged, the changes can still be reviewed. If issues are identified, open a new branch to apply the necessary fixes.

Educate the team about the risks

When this behavior occurs, discuss it with the team and explain the risks associated with merging code without proper review.

Revert the pull request

Retroactively review the changes

Educate the team about the risks

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