PR Screen 101

Pull Requests are the holy grail of any software development process, and getting a 360-degree view into them, and the ability to filter to see the PRs that may require your attention is necessary.

Metrics and what they mean

• Deployment Frequency is the total number of PRs merged to master or main in that selected time period/total number of days in the selected time period.

• PRs > 400 LoC helps you track larger PRs over a certain number of lines of code in the selected time period. The larger the PR, the slower it moves through the review cycle and the higher the probability of bugs.

• Cycle time > 5 days shows all PRs merged in that time period with cycle time greater than 5 days.

• Actively Open PRs show PRs that are ready for review or to be merged. It is a metric that can monitor all PRs opened to date, and ensure you clear any roadblocks for them to be reviewed and released.

• Merged without Review includes PRs from all branches (you can filter the branch if you are interested in a specific branch) and allows you to get a sense of the pull requests skipping the review process (could be hotfixes or smaller changes by senior members of the team).

• Change Failure Rate is the number of hotfix PRs merged to master or main over the total number of PRs merged to master or main.

• Age of PR is calculated as the time from open to merged for merged PRs and time from open to current time for PRs that aren’t merged yet.

 

 

You can use data on this screen to:

• Consistently get a view of the process, proactively coach the team and remind them of your best practices or SLA.

• Show the reviewer reviewing most PRs and schedule a knowledge-sharing session.

• Look at the PRs that are open for longer, and clear roadblocks to push them to production.

• If your average cycle time is higher than expected, you can look at the PRs or engineers swinging the most toward this number.