The time between the earliest commit in a pull request and when the pull request is opened.

Note: Time to Open includes all PRs which were opened during the selected time frame. This includes PRs which were closed, declined, merged, or remain open.

Opening pull requests early increases the visibility of an engineer’s work to the rest of the team. It also allows the developer to set an explicit scope of work and have more awareness about how much time and effort a particular pull request will require. Depending on a team’s tooling, it can trigger continuous integration builds that alert the developer about potential bugs or merge conflicts.

Our research shows that pull requests opened earlier tend to remain open for less time.

If this number is low for the entire team, it may indicate that they don’t have clearly established norms around when pull requests are ready for review. A high Time to Open for an individual could be indicative of a developer facing challenges on the work they’re implementing, or that they’re multitasking (check in on your Work in Progress per Active Contributor for this). Seeing this number decline over time is indicative of an increased practice of continuous delivery.

The median organization averages Time to Open of 38 hours. The fastest quarter of organizations average less than 24 hours, while the slowest quarter average more than 65 hours.