Time to review

Learn how Swarmia calculates pull request review metrics, including time to first review and review time.

Getting a clear view into pull request reviews is one of the key elements of improving both code quality and flow. This page explains how Swarmia measures review time and what you can do to influence it.

There are a few different metrics in Swarmia that account for pull request review time. We recommend starting with time to first review, since it’s the easiest to compare across situations and provides a good indicator of your team’s review practices.

Time to first review

Time to first review measures the time from when a pull request review is first requested until the first review is submitted (whether it’s an approval or request for changes).

This metric shows how long a PR author waits before receiving any feedback. It’s intended to reflect the team’s responsiveness to new PRs and serves as a proxy for how quickly work is picked up for review.

In Swarmia, time to first review can be found on the Code overview page and under Metrics. Learn more about how to streamline your code review process and Review code faster.

☝️ In some cases, a review may be requested but never formally approved before merge (for example, when approval is given informally in comments). In these situations, review time is measured from the review request until the merge.

🤖 Reviews completed by bots are excluded from the aggregate Time to first review metric.

Review time

Review time measures how long it takes to get each review—from the moment it’s requested until it’s received.

This metric helps you spot outliers, such as reviews that take much longer than others—especially when several reviews are required per pull request.

Individual pull request reviews can be viewed on Code review page, where you can also distinguish between reviews from your team and reviews assigned to other teams.

By selecting a pull request, you can see its review time in the context of cycle time and explore the full timeline in more detail. You can see this data as an aggregate on the Pull requests page.