Features, Churn, and Refactor

DEFINITION

Pull requests are categorized into four types: features, churn, refactor, and other. While a balance of churn and refactor is needed to maintain and improve quality, teams should optimize for shipping more features on a sustained, long-term basis.

HOW IT'S MEASURED

To get your team’s overall work breakdown, we take the average work breakdown across all pull requests and then multiply by the number of pull requests merged. For example, features = pull requests × percentage new code.

It is important to note that these definitions are not the same as additions and deletions. For example, your Git provider will capture the change below as 1 addition and 1 deletion. We categorize this change as 1 line of rework (either churn or refactor, depending on how recently the line was last modified).

Whereas measuring additions and deletions overcounts new code by 1 in this example, our definition more accurately reflects your team’s net new changes being delivered.