PR Participation Gap

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

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 Google’s Project Aristotle research 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.