Review wait time

What the measure captures

Review wait time is the portion of a change's lifecycle spent waiting for a reviewer, response, or approval rather than receiving active feedback. It is most useful when the team states the unit of analysis, the start event, the completion event, and the population being measured. A review request, a pull request, and a merge are related events, but they are not interchangeable. Keeping those boundaries visible prevents a dashboard from turning an operational signal into an unexplained score.

A practical example

Split a three-day review interval into author work, reviewer queue time, and policy waiting to identify where flow is actually constrained. Start with a small sample and inspect the underlying requests before creating a target. Record the repository, change type, reviewer path, and relevant policy state. That makes it possible to explain an unusual result instead of simply celebrating or escalating a number. Compare similar work over time and annotate major changes in ownership, branch rules, or automation.

How to use it carefully

Waiting time is difficult to infer when tools do not record state transitions consistently. Avoid presenting estimates as exact labor time. Review metrics work best as prompts for team-level investigation. Combine them with review samples, author and reviewer feedback, escaped defects, rework, and delivery outcomes. Avoid ranking individuals from a single measure because review difficulty, system familiarity, and assignment patterns vary. A healthy process makes useful feedback available at an appropriate time while preserving accountability for the final change.

How this relates to Weave

Weave can connect review events with change context and delivery signals so teams can inspect review wait time alongside review time, pull request size, and flow. That context helps teams investigate queues and quality patterns without treating one review number as a verdict on an engineer.