Even before the launch of a software, developers have burdening tasks to keep in hand in order to make their code sufficient for a “minimum viable product".
This is essentially the moment where the product is finished, but not yet that ready to be deployed. This period can be frustrating to some, that GitHub wants to help by launching a 'draft pull request'.
What it does, is allowing developers to mark their request as a draft.
This in turn will allow the developer to highlight to other project collaborators, notifying them that their code is a work-in-progress and requires some feedback before being deployed into the main project.
Using this feature, the developer can start a conversation with collaborators about their solution, but without necessarily compromising the quality of the main codebase.
To do this, developers can simply mark a pull request as a draft simply by clicking a drop-down menu on the GitHub site.
This useful feature was introduced on February 14th, and is indeed a welcome present to the developer community.
This feature can potentially create a big impact to GitHub in overall. This is because the community is the already the hub for developers and coders alike, with many working together as professional teams.
By allowing them to collaborate on code that will be used in a production setting, GitHub is providing one simple way for them to collaborate before finalizing their project.
Developers working in a team can be hard work and intimidating. The draft pull feature should also bridge this gap, allowing teams for contribute, without harming the project.
According to GitHub:
"With draft pull requests, you can clearly tag when you’re coding a work in progress."
The move comes just one month after the Microsoft-owned GitHub introduced unlimited free private repositories.
It’s also worth noting that draft requests cannot be merged with developers' main codebase. This is likely to prevent developers in accidentally integrating their unfinished code with the master branch.