TL;DR
The median active reviewer submits 5 reviews and reviews 3 PRs each week.
We exclude popular end-of-year weeks when code freezes are common.
By taking the median of medians, we hope to reflect the most common developer experience.
Developers who review more are also likely to merge more code.
24% of active reviewers are not active committers; this means that they merge, on median, 0 PRs a week. Dedicated active reviewers are more common in larger companies.
- Following our second point, active reviewers who rarely ship code still review less frequently than developers who both review and ship code.
On median, developers who review more are also likely to merge more PRs
- As we see below, there is a strong positive correlation between developers’ PR merge frequency and review submission frequency.
23.8% of active reviewers (≥ 1 median review per week) are not active committers (0 median PRs merged per week).
- Perhaps more surprisingly 7.8% of active committers rarely review and do not qualify as active reviewers.
- Smaller companies tend to skew higher on “only merge” developers while larger orgs have more “only review” developers
- Active reviewers who are not actively merging PRs (0 median PRs merged per week) still submit fewer reviews compared to developers who are actively shipping code.
