Time to Merge measures how long your team takes to create, review and merge a Pull Request (PR) to a single branch.

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We measure Time to Merge because code reviews can often get blocked, impacting how fast you can ship your product to your customers (an additional insight that can be gleaned from viewing your team’s Cycle Time).

Optimising Time to Merge will improve the time it takes your team to deliver value to your customers, as well as improve the quality of the value you deliver. When done well, the code commits and their attached messages within a PR tell a story to people examining code at a later date, improving the maintainability and serviceability of the code base.

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Mature Time to Merge practice looks like developers reviewing and merging PRs on the same day they were opened.

This is enabled by the author’s discipline to create small pull requests, constructed with titles that are self-explanatory and descriptions that provide strong context and reason behind what outcome the code is meant to achieve. These practices go a long way in minimising the need for peers to add comments or tasks, and ask for further information to help with their understanding. Speeding up the review workflow by not blocking peers and being able to merge code sooner goes a long way toward building your team’s delivery success.

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For each Pull Request merged during the given interval, Umano measures Time to Merge by observing the time from when the Pull Request was created to the time when it was merged into a single branch.

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Each model looks and specific activities within the tools. Below is a list of activities that contribute to Time to Merge and activities that do not have an impact on this metric.