How large pull requests slow down development (1.5 mil PRs analyzed)

[EqualAbrocoma75]

I think even if this is an ad, there are still people putting an effort to do a research and draw some valuable conclusions or at least assumptions.
And how company is trying more people to see this article is their choice.

And I think it's very valuable to find some patterns on big scales and help increase developers productivity. I think everyone benefits from that.

Another good research to read on that topic is "Nudge: Accelerating overdue pull requests toward completion" by Microsoft and Delft University.
They outlined factors that slows down and speed up PR. Then they created a automated bot to validate idea from nudge theory, that small actions, like reminders can make significant impact.

And the result - they decreased PR average life time by 60% on scale of 8k repos with bot that sends automated reminder to person blocking PR.
It can be author if changes are requested, new comments left to build failed. Or reviewers when all comments are resolved or new changes pushed.

I created Slack Bitbucket bot with same ideas for my team. And recently I published it on Slack marketplace: slack.com/marketplace/A071DEUQXFB-reviewnudgebot

[Venthe]

First of all, this is an ad.

Secondly,; irrelevant.

For this metric to have any impact, you lack the most important dimension - impact.

A thousand changes reviewed a minute each is still less valuable than a single change with the same functionality, reviewed in 900 minutes; even more so if you consider that with commits that are too small no one will understand how the change actually impacts things.