review-velocity

Analyze how quickly PRs get reviewed — average time-to-review, distribution breakdown, and bottleneck detection.

See how fast (or slow) your team is at reviewing PRs. review-velocity calculates the time from PR creation to when you submitted your review, then breaks it down by time buckets and identifies which repositories or authors create the slowest reviews.

When to Use

End of sprint: “Are we reviewing fast enough?”
Identify bottlenecks: “Which repos/authors take forever to review?”
Set SLAs: “What a reasonable review time target?”
Track improvement: “Did our new process help?”

Synopsis

prctrl review-velocity [OPTIONS]

Options

Flag	Description	Default
`-d, --days <NUM>`	Number of days to look back	`30`
`-b, --bottlenecks`	Show bottleneck analysis by author/repo	`false`
`-P, --priority`	Show priority vs review time breakdown	`false`
`--repo <TEXT>`	Filter by repository name (partial match, case-insensitive)
`--author <TEXT>`	Filter by author username (partial match, case-insensitive)
`-s, --since-days <NUM>`	Only show PRs created since this many days ago
`-p, --pr <NUM>`	Target a specific PR by number
`--json`	Output as JSON for scripting	`false`

Examples

# Standard 30-day velocity analysis
prctrl review-velocity

# Quick 7-day snapshot
prctrl review-velocity --days 7

# With bottleneck analysis (see slowest repos/authors)
prctrl review-velocity --bottlenecks

# With priority breakdown (correlate priority scores with review speed)
prctrl review-velocity --priority

# Combine all analysis options
prctrl review-velocity --bottlenecks --priority

# Filter by specific repository
prctrl review-velocity --repo backend

# Filter by specific author
prctrl review-velocity --author alice

# Combine filters with bottleneck analysis
prctrl review-velocity --repo api --bottlenecks

# Only PRs created in the last 14 days (regardless of when reviewed)
prctrl review-velocity --since-days 14

# Show velocity for a specific PR
prctrl review-velocity --pr 123

# Combine --since-days with other filters
prctrl review-velocity --since-days 7 --repo backend --bottlenecks

# JSON for dashboards
prctrl review-velocity --json | jq '.avg_hours_to_review'

Output Example

⚡ Review Velocity — last 30 days
─────────────────────────────────────────────

  📊 Summary (23 PRs reviewed)
     Average time to review:  18.4 hours
     Median time to review:    12.0 hours
     Fastest review:           0.5 hours
     Slowest review:           72.0 hours

  ⏱️  Time Distribution
     < 4h:       4 (17.4%)  ▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
     4-24h:      8 (34.8%)  ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░
     1-3d:       7 (30.4%)  ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░
     > 3d:       4 (17.4%)  ▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░

  ⭐ Priority vs Review Time
     ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐  5 PRs  28.3h avg  ████████████
     ⭐⭐⭐⭐    8 PRs  14.2h avg  ████████
     ⭐⭐⭐     10 PRs  8.5h avg   █████
     ⭐⭐        0 PRs   0.0h avg
     ⭐         0 PRs   0.0h avg

  🐢 Bottleneck Analysis — by Author
     (slowest average review time)
     alice     ██████████  36.2h avg  (5 PRs)
     bob       ████████    28.1h avg  (8 PRs)
     carol     ███████      22.4h avg  (4 PRs)

  🐢 Bottleneck Analysis — by Repository
     (slowest average review time)
     backend   ██████████  32.1h avg  (12 PRs)
     frontend  ███████      18.5h avg  (7 PRs)
     shared    ████        8.2h avg   (4 PRs)

  💡 Use `--bottlenecks` to see which repos/authors take longest
  💡 Use `--priority` to correlate priority with review speed
  💡 Use `--json` for machine-readable output
─────────────────────────────────────────────

How It Works

Review velocity reads the processed review files saved in your output directory (default: ./reviews/). Each file contains both Created and Reviewed on timestamps, allowing calculation of the review time in hours.

Filters are applied efficiently:

--since-days filter is checked before expensive parsing (early exit)
--days filter then filters by review date
--repo and --author filters are applied last for precise filtering

Time buckets:

< 4h — Same day reviews (fast turnaround)
4-24h — Next day reviews (typical)
1-3d — Multi-day reviews (getting slow)
> 3d — Stale reviews (bottleneck indicator)

Bottleneck analysis shows which authors or repositories have the highest average review times, helping identify process or knowledge gaps.

Priority vs Review Time (with --priority flag) shows how long high vs low priority PRs take to review. This helps answer questions like “Are we prioritizing urgent reviews?”

Tips

Requires review files from delegate command
Use --days 7 for weekly view, --days 90 for quarterly context
Track your velocity over time to see if process changes help
Pair with trends for complete review analytics
Use --priority to see if critical PRs are getting the attention they deserve

Keyboard shortcuts

PRCtrl