Tracking squashed commits

GitHub allows you to "squash" commits before merging a pull request. Swarmia supports this workflow.

It's possible to squash commits when merging a pull request to keep the commit history clean – your individual commits will be replaced with one commit for the whole pull request. It makes it slightly easier to use commands like git blame to see which feature contributed to a change, but on the other hand it loses some detail about why a specific change was made. It's mostly a matter of personal preference, and we see teams deciding either way.

Squashing commits might cause issues with some other analytics tools because you're losing some detail from the history of a pull request, as it now looks like it was a single commit. In other tools this might mess up calculating things like cycle times.

Swarmia will keep the history available in the context of the pull request. This way we'll report cycle time correctly, and you'll see the detailed work in views like Work Log.