What is PR Review Time?
How long a pull request waits for, and spends in, code review.
Definition
PR review time measures the review portion of a pull request's life: the time from "ready for review" to the first review (review latency), plus the time spent iterating in review before approval. It is often the largest and most variable slice of PR cycle time.
How it’s measured
Split it into time-to-first-review (how long a PR waits before anyone looks) and review duration (first review to approval), from pull-request and review timestamps. Track the averages and the share of cycle time review represents.
What good looks like
Strong teams keep time-to-first-review under a few hours and total review time under a day for normal-sized PRs. When review becomes the dominant slice of cycle time, it is the bottleneck — common as AI raises authoring throughput faster than review capacity.
Why it matters
Reviews are where flow most often stalls. Watching review time catches the classic trap where teams ship code faster but reviews back up, so cycle time does not actually improve — the bottleneck just moved.
Related terms
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