Feedback Flows

A stylized line graph shows time to merge is high at 18 hours but is trending up.

What it is: This graph shows how much feedback each person gave on other people’s PRs, how much feedback they got on their own PRs, and how feedback flows between people. If you have seniority set up, the graph will be color-coded by seniority, which can help you quickly see at-a-glance if feedback flows are as expected across your team.

Why it matters: The top benefits of code reviews are improving code quality, knowledge-transfer, and learning. Moreover, there’s bias in who gets good feedback. Visualizing feedback flows can show us whether there are silos, and how we’re doing across the team at supporting each other.

How we calculate it: We look at the number of comments and reviews that each person (or team) gave and received on their PRs. We then show how the feedback moves across people and teams.

What good looks like

In the best teams, everyone is giving feedback and everyone is receiving feedback, or at least asking questions about others’ work. In these teams, seniors give plenty of feedback to juniors and intermediates – and juniors and intermediates feel comfortable asking questions to seniors.

We also look at several indicators of collaboration. In this bucket, we’re examining who gets support and who’s not getting enough support. We also show the people who are doing a lot of work to support others. This type of “glue work” is easy to miss but is important for team success and benefits the whole organization.

These metrics show patterns in comments on GitHub. To see review patterns, you can turn on the Show reviews only filter; this will show only reviews with at least 1 comment, rather than all comments.