Review Process

Do you follow proper review processes to ensure delivery quality?

Purpose

Having effective review and PR merge processes in place helps to create quality deliveries and smooth running teams. The review process dashboard provides a top-level view across teams and repositories to identify PRs that don't follow standard review processes and work that was started but discarded.

Improvement Actions: Teams who, to a significant degree, are not following the review and approval process might need training. If the process shortcuts are caused by tight deadlines or under-resourcing, some improved planning and resourcing process might be helpful.

As a first step, it is useful to understand the underlying cause. These can be technical, procedural or personal.

Explanations

Merge Success: This view shows how much PR work was merged in the selected time period. High levels of merges typically indicate short development cycles and little discarded work. For short time periods, there are more in-flight PRs and lower merge rates are expected.

Non-Productive Work: This shows the number of PRs that have been closed without being merged or have been open for more than 3 weeks without being merged/closed. This might indicate work that was discarded or abandoned and did not end up in the product.

Merged Outside Process: This shows the percentage of all PR in the set timeframe that were merged without approval or review. This should be closely examined to ensure ongoing quality of delivery.

Pull Request Workflow: This flowchart visualises the journey of each PR through the stages of open, review, approve and merge/closed. If much of the flow bypasses the review and approval stages, then common processes are not followed. If much of the flow bypasses the merge stage, that work is possibly discarded, which might indicate a high level of failed experiments or imprecisely specified work.

Good to Know

Certain organisations have specific approaches that might invalidate some of the above. This includes the absence of review policies or particular merge/close behaviours. This should be clarified with the respective teams.