PR Cycle Time Analyzer
Measure how long pull requests in any public GitHub repository take from opening to merge, with median, distribution, and recent throughput.
Analyze a public repository
Scopy reads the most recently updated closed pull requests through GitHub's public API, from your browser. No token, no repository access.
Open → merge time
Median, p75, p90, and the merge-time distribution will appear here after analysis.
Cycle time report
Analyze a public repository to generate a shareable Markdown report.
What does PR cycle time tell you?
Cycle time — the clock time from opening a pull request to merging it — is the most honest single number about a team's review process. It includes waiting for a reviewer, the review itself, rework, and re-review. When it grows, authors context-switch away, branches drift, and merge conflicts multiply the original work.
The analyzer reads the most recently updated closed pull requests of a public repository through GitHub's API, directly from your browser, and computes the distribution of open-to-merge times for human-authored PRs. Bot traffic — dependency updates, release automation — is counted separately because it would otherwise dominate the statistics in most active repositories.
Read the percentiles together. A low median with a high p90 means most changes flow but some get stuck, which usually points at unclear ownership or oversized PRs rather than slow reviewers. A uniformly high distribution points at review capacity: too few reviewers, or review treated as interruptible background work.
The numbers come from the most recent closed PRs GitHub returns, so treat them as a current snapshot rather than a full history. Repositories with little recent activity produce small samples, and the tool says so instead of pretending precision.
Related reading: Code review best practices for fast-moving teams.
Frequently asked questions
- Why measure time to merge instead of time to first review?
- Time to first review needs per-PR timeline data, which costs one API call per pull request and exhausts the public rate limit after a handful of repositories. Open-to-merge time comes from a single request, and in practice the two correlate strongly: teams that merge fast review fast.
- Does it work on private repositories?
- No. The analyzer uses GitHub's unauthenticated public API from your browser and never asks for a token. For private repositories, run the same analysis with your own credentials or use a review analytics product.
- What is a good PR cycle time?
- Healthy teams commonly merge the median PR within one working day, with p90 under a week. But trend beats target: a median moving from four hours to two days is a real signal regardless of what other teams do.
- Why are bot pull requests excluded from the main numbers?
- Bots like dependency updaters open large volumes of PRs that merge either instantly or never, which distorts every percentile. The tool counts them separately so you can see both the human process and the automation traffic.
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