This week, we’re excited to announce the second feature in the automated engineering insights suite: PR Cycle Time. This feature provides valuable insights into the health of your pull requests (PR), allowing you to identify blockers in the development cycle, improve your PR workflow, and accelerate your engineering velocity.
Let’s take a look.
💡 We have released AI insights and Benchmarks for PR Cycle Time – take a look!
Understanding PR Cycle Time
PR cycle time is the time taken from the creation of a Pull Request (PR) until it gets merged or closed. Shorter cycle times indicate a faster review process and quicker integration of changes into the codebase.
It’s important to keep track of this metric– sometimes PR’s may go unnoticed leading to stale code. Your developers can spend hours coding, just for the PR’s to sit there for days.
At Tara, we have seen a 2x increase in delivery speed, and improved PR health, after we started monitoring our cycle time.
Here’s why:
▶️ Assessing efficiency: By analyzing the cycle time, teams can understand how efficiently they are working. A shorter cycle time usually means faster review and integration of code, suggesting a high level of efficiency.
▶️ Identifying blockers: Longer cycle time could indicate bottlenecks in the review or merge processes. This provides teams with insights to take action.
▶️ Performance monitoring: PR cycle time is a good metric for tracking individual or team performance. It can highlight areas where additional support or resources may be needed.
▶️ Process improvement: Regular monitoring of cycle time can inform process improvements, helping teams create and implement more effective workflows.
Introducing PR Cycle Time Dashboard
Our new PR Cycle Time dashboard is designed to provide a clear understanding of your cycle time and overall PR health. It shows you the duration for every PR in a repository including:
- Time to open
- Time to review
- Time to merge/close
With this dashboard, you can easily choose which team and timeframe to look at, and filter and sort all information from the toolbar. Whether you want to see data for the entire team, an individual contributor, or a specific repo, you’ll be able to get the insights you need at your fingertips to unblock your team.
Empowering Engineering Teams
Our PR Cycle Time feature is designed to help engineering teams answer critical questions around their PR workflow, such as:
- How long does the review process take for each PR?
- Are PR’s being picked up fast enough, or is there a long waiting period?
- Where do the blockers lie in our process?
- Why is a certain PR taking longer to merge? Who owns the PR?
- Is team member X being assigned to too many PR’s?
- What’s the average cycle time of the team?
and more!
We are hoping that this dashboard can help teams make strategic decisions when it comes to resource allocation, enabling a seamless workflow and higher velocity. For example, teams can decide if they need to focus on standardizing the review process to reduce their cycle time or assign more reviews to high-priority tasks.
Having a clear understanding of your team’s PR health is key to improving your engineering performance and efficiency. We’re hoping that our new feature will provide the insights you need to remove bottlenecks and ensure that your team is achieving optimal efficiency.
More to come as we continue to grant access to teams.
Request access today.