PR Feedback Given

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

What it is: The number of comments written on PRs.

Why it matters: This visualizes who is giving the most support, since PR reviews and comments are a way to share knowledge and to encourage growth and learning opportunities.‍ Giving feedback on PRs can be an example of glue work, the somewhat-invisible work that people do to lift up others on the team; our goal is to make this work more visible and valued on teams.

How we calculate it: The total number of comments written on PRs, including comments on one's own PR. We include comments on your own PR because they are often in response to a reviewer question, so these can also contribute to learning and knowledge-sharing on the team.

What good looks like

While written communication styles differ between individuals, if a team that does their code reviews on GitHub, then 10 comments per person is a good benchmark to hit. This is based on research from our own data, looking across 6 person-weeks of data for 10 randomly sampled orgs in the Multitudes dataset.

The trends we expect will vary by level. Senior engineers are expected to give more feedback than juniors, to share their knowledge across the team. However, juniors have a lot to offer in code reviews too, via a fresh perspective and clarifying questions (more here about why it’s important to include juniors in code reviews).

That’s why we still recommend teams aim for more balanced participation across the team – it’s always good to make sure that your juniors feel comfortable speaking their mind and asking questions during code review.