Does your organization have a lot of open pull requests? How old are they?
GitHub invented pull requests for the low-trust world of open source development, but let’s put that aside for today.
Assuming you use pull requests in your workflow, having a lot of them open isn’t necessarily a negative. If you have a lot of people producing work, at any given moment, you’ll likely have a lot of pull requests.
The bigger question is how old are they? Minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks?
Every moment that a PR sits in a non-closed state is work that you’ve paid for but that isn’t benefitting your customers. Every moment that a PR sits in a non-closed state the knowledge half-life is taking effect in your team members’ heads.
If your PRs are aging, and the number of PRs keeps creeping up, then there isn’t any benefit in having your developers write more code. New code won’t make it out the door because it’ll languish in “code review.”
If you find yourself in this state, look to your process. When do your developers call a work item “done?”
