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title: “PR Cycle Time” description: > PR Cycle Time sidebar_position: 14

What is this metric?

PR Cycle Time is the sum of PR Coding Time, Pickup TIme, Review Time and Deploy Time. It is the total time from the first commit to when the PR is deployed.

Why is it important?

PR Cycle Time indicates the overall velocity of the delivery progress in terms of PR.

Which dashboard(s) does it exist in?

• Engineering Throughput and Cycle Time
• Engineering Throughput and Cycle Time - Team View

How is it calculated?

You can define deployment based on your actual practice. For a full list of deployment's definitions that DevLake support, please refer to Deployment Frequency.

Data Sources Required

This metric relies on PRs/MRs collected from GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Gitee or other code review tools.

Data Transformation Required

N/A

SQL Queries

The following SQL shows how to find the cycle time of a specific PR. DevLake pre-calculates the metric and stores it in table.project_pr_metrics.

SELECT
  pr_cycle_time/60 as 'PR Cycle Time(h)'
FROM
  project_pr_metrics

If you want to measure the monthly trend of PR cycle time in the screenshot below, please run the following SQL in Grafana.

SELECT 
  DATE_ADD(date(pr.created_date), INTERVAL -DAY(date(pr.created_date))+1 DAY) as time,
  avg(ppm.pr_cycle_time)/60 as 'PR Cycle Time(h)'
FROM 
  pull_requests pr
  JOIN project_pr_metrics ppm ON pr.id = ppm.id
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 1

How to improve?

1. Divide coding tasks into workable and manageable pieces;
2. Use DevLake's dashboards to monitor your delivery progress;
3. Have a habit to check for hanging PRs regularly;
4. Set up alerts for your communication tools (e.g. Slack, Lark) when new PRs are issued;
5. Use automated tests for the initial work;
6. Reduce PR size;
7. Analyze the causes for long reviews.