Developers can merge individual pull requests or entire stacks, including via the merge queue, after which any remaining changes are automatically rebased so the next unmerged PR targets the base branch.
Monorepos and platform engineering drive shift to modular development
For Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting, Stacked PR is GitHub’s response to a structural shift being driven by large-scale monorepos and platform engineering, which are pushing teams toward more modular, parallel workflows.
“GitHub’s traditional PR model created a bottleneck where developers either waited long cycles for reviews or bundled work into large, hard-to-review PRs that increased risk and slowed merges. Stacking solves this by letting developers break a feature into smaller, dependent PRs such as database, API, and UI layers, so reviews happen incrementally while development continues in parallel,” Jain said.
