The time between the earliest commit in a pull request and when the pull request is opened.
Why it matters: Opening pull requests early increases the visibility of an engineers 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. Also, depending on a team’s tooling, it can trigger continuous integration builds early that alerts the developer about potential merge conflicts.
Our research has shown that pull requests that are open earlier tend to remain open for less time.
How to use it: 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.
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.