Cycle time is a critical metric that assesses the efficiency of your development process and captures the total time taken from the first commit to when the PR is merged or closed. Cycle time provides valuable insight into the efficiency of the delivery process, helping teams identify bottlenecks and improve overall workflow. Reducing the overall cycle time allows organizations to release features or updates to end-users sooner.
Cycle time is often broken down into four phases: Coding, Pickup, Review, and Merge, which represent the key stages of the development pipeline. These phases are commonly used to analyze PR cycle time. Smaller pull requests are easier to plan, review, and deploy, making it beneficial to focus on reducing the size of PRs during these phases.
The total PR cycle time is the sum of the durations of each phase. Average PR cycle time is calculated by averaging the total cycle times across multiple pull requests. Consistent, low cycle times allow better forecasting of project timelines and resource allocation.
PR Review Time is the third stage i.e. the time taken from the Pull Request creation until it gets merged or closed. Efficiently reducing PR Review is crucial for optimizing the development workflow.
Monitoring cycle time helps teams evaluate their performance and identify areas for improvement. In this blog post, we’ll explore strategies to effectively manage and reduce review time to boost your team’s productivity and success. Collaboration and team morale improve when teams regularly assess and optimize their development processes.
Cycle time is a crucial metric that measures the average time PR spends in all stages of the development pipeline. These stages are:
Analyzing different aspects of cycle time, such as organizational, team, iteration, and branch levels, provides a comprehensive view of the development workflow. PR time refers to the overall duration from the initial commit to the merging of a pull request, covering all these stages.
A shorter cycle time indicates an optimized process and highly efficient teams. This can be correlated with higher stability and enables the team to identify bottlenecks and quickly respond to issues with change. Lower cycle time leads to getting feedback from end users faster.
Key points:
The PR Review Time encompasses the time taken for peer review and feedback on the pull request. It is a critical component of PR Cycle Time that represents the duration of a Pull Request (PR) spent in the review stage before it is approved and merged. Review time is essential for understanding the efficiency of the code review process within a development team.
Waiting time, which is the duration between approval and merging, is a key component of PR review time and can significantly impact the overall cycle time.
Conducting code reviews as frequently as possible is crucial for a team that strives for ongoing improvement. Ideally, code should be reviewed in near real-time, with a maximum time frame of 2 days for completion.
If your review time is high, the platform will display the review time as red -
Long reviews can be identifed in the "Pull Request" tab and see all the open PRs.
You can also identify all the PRs having a high cycle time by clicking on view PRs in the cycle time card.
See all the pending reviews in the “Pull Request” and identify them with the oldest review in sequence.
It's common for teams to experience communication breakdowns, even the most proficient ones. To address this issue, we suggest utilizing typo's Slack alerts to monitor requests that are left hanging. This feature allows channels to receive notifications only after a specific time period (12 hrs as default) has passed, which can be customized to your preference. Writing clear descriptions in pull requests helps reviewers understand the changes better and speeds up the review process.
Another helpful practice is assigning a reviewer to work alongside developers, particularly those new to the team. Additionally, we encourage the team to utilize personal Slack alerts, which will directly notify them when they are assigned to review a code.
When a team is swamped with work, extensive pull requests may also be left unattended if reviewing them requires significant time. To avoid this issue, it's recommended to break down tasks into shorter and faster iterations. This approach not only reduces cycle time but also helps to accelerate the pickup time for code reviews. Shorter in-progress time means focusing on splitting work into smaller batches that are easy to plan, review, and deploy.
When a bug is discovered that requires a patch to be made, a high-priority feature comes down from the CEO. In such situations, countless unexpected events may demand immediate attention, causing other ongoing work, including code reviews, to take a back seat.
Code reviews are frequently deprioritized in favor of other tasks, such as creating pull requests with your own changes. This behavior is often a result of engineers misunderstanding how reviews fit into the broader software development lifecycle (SDLC). However, it's important to recognize that code waiting for review is essentially at the finish line, ready to be incorporated and provide value. Every hour that a review is delayed means one less hour of improvement that the new code could bring to the application.
Certain teams restrict the number of individuals who can conduct PR reviews, typically reserving this task for senior members. While this approach is well-intentioned and ensures that only top-tier code is released into production, it can create significant bottlenecks, with review requests accumulating on the desks of just one or a few people. This ultimately results in slower cycle times, even if it improves code quality. Adopting a working agreement can help in monitoring and managing pull requests effectively.
Pickup time revolutionizes pull request workflow optimization, representing the transformative interval between when a pull request achieves ready-for-review status and when reviewers initiate their first action. This game-changing metric becomes particularly powerful in the context of draft PRs—pull requests that streamline works-in-progress development by remaining outside the immediate review queue until teams determine readiness.
When developers leverage draft PR capabilities, this strategic approach signals that code remains in development phases, ensuring the pickup time tracking system stays dormant. The transformation occurs when draft PRs convert to ready-for-review status, instantly activating the pickup phase optimization cycle. From this pivotal moment, pull requests enter the streamlined review queue, and AI-driven tracking systems monitor the duration spent awaiting reviewer engagement, capturing this as enhanced pickup time metrics.
For software development teams pursuing accelerated development processes and revolutionary time-to-market achievements, mastering pickup time management transforms operational efficiency. Extended pickup times reveal critical bottlenecks within review workflows, such as unclear ownership structures, overloaded reviewer capacity, or insufficient visibility into emerging PRs. By leveraging pickup time analytics, teams unlock targeted improvement opportunities, such as implementing data-driven working agreements that establish optimal pickup time thresholds for all PRs, including those transitioning from draft status.
Measuring pickup time for draft PRs transforms workflow visibility by tracking the precise duration from ready-for-review activation to initial review engagement. This powerful metric, combined with review time and merge time analytics, delivers comprehensive pull request cycle time intelligence. By monitoring these interconnected metrics, teams enhance their development velocity assessment capabilities, identify process inefficiencies, and continuously optimize their workflow systems.
To amplify process optimization outcomes, teams should systematically analyze metrics like average PR cycle time, lead time, and coding time analytics. These transformative metrics drive progress tracking, measure process change effectiveness, and ensure feedback loop optimization remains robust. For example, when average pickup time trends upward, teams can leverage these insights to recalibrate priorities or adjust reviewer assignment strategies, maintaining healthy PR pipeline flow dynamics. Automation of testing, builds, and deployments through CI/CD pipelines can reduce manual errors and improve efficiency.
In summary, pickup time—particularly as it revolutionizes draft PR workflows—represents a critical metric for transforming pull request cycle time management. By effectively measuring and optimizing pickup time, software development teams unlock bottleneck identification capabilities, accelerate review process efficiency, and deliver superior software solutions to market with unprecedented speed. Leveraging these powerful insights drives continuous improvement initiatives and empowers teams to implement data-driven decision-making processes that transform their entire development ecosystem.
Here are some steps on how you can monitor and reduce your review time
With typo, you can set the goal to keep the review time under 24 hrs recommended by us. After setting the goal, the system sends personal Slack real-time alerts when PRs are assigned to be reviewed.
Prioritize the critical functionalities and high-risk areas of the software during the review, as they are more likely to have significant issues. This can help you focus on the most critical items first and reduce review time.
Conduct code reviews frequently to catch and fix issues early on in the development cycle. This ensures that issues are identified and resolved quickly, rather than waiting until the end of the development cycle.
Establish coding standards and guidelines to ensure consistency in the codebase, which can help to identify potential issues more efficiently. Keep a close tab on the following metrics that can impact your review time -
Ensure that there is clear communication among the development team and stakeholders to quickly identify issues and resolve them timely.
Peer reviews can help catch issues that may have been missed during individual code reviews. By having team members review each other's code, you can ensure that all issues are caught and resolved quickly.
Minimizing PR review time is crucial for enhancing the team's overall productivity and efficient development workflow. By implementing these, organizations can significantly reduce cycle times and enable faster delivery of high-quality code. Prioritizing these practices will lead to continuous improvement and greater success in software development process.
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