PR Participation Gap
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What it is: This shows the absolute difference between the most and least frequent commenters on the team.
Why it matters: This measure shows how imbalanced team participation is in reviews and comments. More balanced participation is a behavioral indicator of psychological safety, which showed is the number one determinant of team performance.
How we calculate it: We count the number of comments that each person has written and then show the range from the highest count to the lowest count.
We exclude team members who wrote zero comments, because sometimes teams will have a few team members who are not on GitHub often, but included in the data.
We can only calculate this for teams with at least 2 people; for a team of one person, there is no gap to calculate.
We include comments on all PRs, including draft and open PRs. This is because it’s still someone giving feedback / sharing knowledge with someone else, even if the PR is still in a draft state.
What good looks like
The smaller the gaps are, the better – a smaller gap means that people are contributing more equally. Looking at distributions of participation gaps each week across various teams and organizations, we found that a threshold difference of 25 comments would be a reasonably realistic goal for most teams.
