Pull Request

DEFINITION

A pull request is a measurable unit of working software. Engineers create pull requests to notify team members when a new body of working code is ready for review.

HOW IT'S MEASURED

When calculating metrics like Features per Engineer, we automatically ignore pull requests in development workflows—such as dependency updates, back merges, and releases—that are not representative of developer productivity. 

A pull request is excluded from your metrics if it meets any of the following criteria:

• It is authored by a bot (e.g. a dependency update)
• The head branch is the default branch (e.g. a back merge to sync changes from default into a development branch)
• It does not include any unique commits that haven’t already existed in a previous pull request (e.g. merging a release branch into main)
• More than three authors merged a pull request into the head branch (e.g. a long-lived feature branch)

You can review the list of pull requests that are included in our calculations by hovering over a data point and viewing more pull requests in the flyout.