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What is Review Progress?
We can often get excited about designing and building work, but less excited reviewing the work we create. A common driver for team’s with low completion rates and high rates of work in progress is that they don’t leave enough time or capacity when planning for reviewing their work. Umano created Review Progress to help teams get the right balance between time spent designing and building work with time spent reviewing their work. This helps teams identify blockers in their review workflow, along with maintaining momentum and satisfaction from completing work regularly.
Review Progress maps the lifecycle of all pull requests for an interval, including whether the pull request is open, reviewed or merged.
Why does Review Progress matter?
Review progress provides insight into your review workflow.
It highlights any blockers that may be slowing momentum and require remediation. It also helps provide visibility if additional support is required to maintain an appropriate balance between speed and quality of your review practices.
What does a 'good' Review Progress look like?
Review Progress is presented as a count of pull requests per stage.
A good Review Progress reflects more, if not all pull requests merged at the end of the interval, relative to any pull requests still in a pending or reviewed state.
How does TeamX measure Review Progress?
Review Progress is measured from:
the number of pull requests merged during the interval
the number of pull requests that were reviewed during the interval, but not merged
the number of pull requests that were opened in the current or a prior interval without being reviewed and merged.
TeamX surfaces the life cycle for each pull request assigned in an interval.
For pending pull requests, TeamX displays how long the PR has been open for and any comments made by team members.
For reviewed pull requests, TeamX displays all commenters and reviewers, including when any of these events occurred during prior or current intervals.
For merged pull requests, TeamX displays all commenters, reviewers and team members that merged the pull request, including when any of these events occurred during prior or current intervals.
What drives your Review Progress?
Activities that contribute to and influence Review Progress include all the pull requests that are assigned to an interval.
Your Review Progress is also influenced by:
Number of active pull requests
Number of reviews per pull request
Number of reviewers assigned
Size of pull request
Number of comments
Number of tasks
Number of updates
Number of updates after the last review
Tips for improving your Review Progress.
Refer to TeamX's Time in Status metric to understand the bigger picture of your issues lifecycle, and whether work is getting blocked in any review status.
Balance your team’s time spent designing and building issues with time spent reviewing issues in each interval. Ensure you leave enough time to review and merge your pull requests each interval so that you don’t get a backlog of pull requests requiring team attention. This will also help create a fresh start for your next interval.
In your Team’s planning meetings, be realistic about the time it takes to review your work so that you don’t over plan and assign more issues than you can complete; referring to TeamX's Completion Rate and Cycle Time metrics will help you here.
Build your team’s culture of collaboration and spread the load by inviting all relevant team members to pick up a pull request opened for review.
Ensure pull request reviews aren’t reviewed by your most experienced engineers by default, and encourage everyone to contribute to building your team’s review culture.