Automatically Backfill Dev Environments with Pull Request When Changes Are Promoted Downstream
Description:
Currently, Gearset’s pipeline tool does a great job of back-propagating changes between static environments when a change is made further down the pipeline. However, this behavior does not extend to developer environments, even if the change originated from a feature branch tied to that dev environment.
Problem:
If a developer starts work on a branch in their dev environment, and then that branch is promoted down the pipeline (e.g., through UAT, Staging, etc.), and changes are made to the branch further down (e.g., hotfixes, last-minute edits), those updates do not automatically get proposed back to the original dev environment.
This leads to:
- Dev environments drifting out of sync with the branch they were created from.
- Increased manual effort to merge updates back into a dev environment.
- A risk of bugs or inconsistencies when developers continue work unaware of downstream updates.
Proposed Solution:
When changes are made to a branch in a static environment further down the pipeline, and that branch originated from a dev environment, automatically create a pull request to update the dev environment’s branch with those changes.
This would:
- Keep the dev environment aligned with the true state of the branch.
- Reduce manual syncing and the risk of drift.
- Improve collaboration and awareness for developers working on long-lived branches.
