Measure
Review queue
You might say: PR backlog, reviewer load
The count and age of pull requests waiting for an automated or human review. Read volume and wait together because either can hide the bottleneck.
- What it does
- Shows whether generated work is arriving faster than the available review capacity.
- Ask
- How many changes await review, how old are they, and which gate is holding them?
- Trouble
- Queue age grows, reviewers skip evidence, or stale pull requests merge after attention has moved elsewhere.
What to look for
- A list of open pull requests sorted by review age
- Queue depth and time-to-first-review charts
- Labels for waiting on checks, bot review, or human review
Sources
- Addy Osmani, Agentic Code Review, What the 2026 data actually shows
median review duration up 441.5%, with time-to-first-review and average review time both roughly doubling
- Addy Osmani, Agentic Code Review, What the 2026 data actually shows
This is already how I work on my own projects, including the open-source ones that now see more PRs in a day than I could carefully read in an evening.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Review queue" (review-queue) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal