Time to First Review
Pull Request Lifecycle
hours
Measures how long it takes for reviewers to first engage with pull requests.
💡 Like a colleague response time in chat, how quickly does someone acknowledge your pull request and start engaging with it?
What It Measures
Measures how long it takes for reviewers to first engage with pull requests.
Why It Matters
Identifying review bottlenecks in your process
Understanding how quickly reviewers respond to new work
How It's Calculated
Calculates the median time from PR creation to first review action, excluding automated actions under 1 minute.
MEDIAN(hours(pr_created_at, first_review_action) WHERE action_duration > 1 minute)Concrete Example
If your team's median time to first review is 3 hours, reviewers are picking up new PRs within half a business day, a solid response time.
What Does a Healthy Score Look Like?
Lower is better, fast first review keeps developers unblocked.
Healthy
Under 2 hours
Watch Out
2–8 hours
Needs Attention
Over 8 hours. PRs are waiting more than a day for first eyes
What Moves This Metric?
Goes up when…
Overloaded reviewers with too many parallel PRs
Requests going to unavailable teammates
No team SLA on review response time
Goes down when…
Team agreements on responding to new PRs within a set timeframe
Review rotation ensuring even distribution
Smaller PRs that are quicker to start reviewing
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