Understand the flow of a PR from commit to merge
PR Cycle time measures the median time your Pull Requests are in three different stages: Dev, Waiting, and Review.
Phase 1: Dev
The first phase looks at how long the particular PR was in development. However, there are different lenses to look at software development. Some leaders prefer to see how quickly a commit makes it to the main branch (First Commit), others want to capture the time spent in doing development by looking at when work actually started, using Jira data (First Activity). In the Build page, this choice can be changed to explore the other option.
Definitions:
First Commit to PR
Uplevel looks at the time period from the first commit to when the PR is submitted for review. If a PR is opened immediately after the first commit, your First Commit to PR time will be shown as 0 hours. If a PR is opened as a draft or work in progress, then this phase will end when it is converted to be ready for review.
Uplevel looks at the time period from the first commit to when the PR is submitted for review. If a PR is opened immediately after the first commit, your First Commit to PR time will be shown as 0 hours. If a PR is opened as a draft or work in progress, then this phase will end when it is converted to be ready for review.
First Activity to PR
To determine the first activity, Uplevel looks at linked Jira/ADO issues, it then looks for the first time that a linked issue moved to an "In Progress" state. Uplevel then chooses the first time this occurred, or the first commit - whichever came first. This phase is then the duration of time from the First Activity until the PR is submitted for review. If a PR is opened as a draft or work in progress, then this phase will end when it is converted to be ready for review.
To determine the first activity, Uplevel looks at linked Jira/ADO issues, it then looks for the first time that a linked issue moved to an "In Progress" state. Uplevel then chooses the first time this occurred, or the first commit - whichever came first. This phase is then the duration of time from the First Activity until the PR is submitted for review. If a PR is opened as a draft or work in progress, then this phase will end when it is converted to be ready for review.
Phase 2: Waiting
The Waiting phase looks at how long a PR is waiting for a review. It captures the time from when the PR is opened (or converted from a draft) to the first action (e.g., commenting, request for changes, approval) from a reviewer. Keep an eye out for this section — it's common to see bottlenecks here.
Phase 3: Review
Review captures the time from the first review action from a reviewer to the time the PR is merged. If there is a lot of back and forth, this phase could be longer and might be an area to look into.
Opportunities
Uplevel captures a number of the most important contributing factors of PR Cycle Time as component metrics.
Each component metric has a benchmark based on Uplevel customer and industry data. When component metrics don't meet the benchmark, they are surfaced as opportunities:
Opportunities are the first place you should focus when hoping to reduce your organization's PR Cycle Time and overall increase your effectiveness in this part of the software development lifecycle.
Export Data
All the underlying data for PR Cycle time is available for export. Note that not all columns are available by default.
