We have been working for GitLab for some time, analyzing activity, community and performance in several of their projects like GitLab CE and GitLab EE. And of the questions they have asked has been: how many merge requests do we have open each week?. This workload insight helps to manage the effort spent in code review.
One of the first tasks done by a developer during the day is to choose where to go and what to fix. Backlogs are quite useful for this purpose, either using Kanban and directly having a look at the open issues waiting lists project by project as in the case of GitHub, or using any other manual or automated method.
For this engineering focus we have started to produce some panels whose main purpose is to help developers to make decisions. As this is still in its first stages there is room for improvement, but this hopefully shows how powerful this could be. The displayed panel is part of the open analytics panel produced for the CoreOS community.
CoreOS Pull Requests / Issues Backlog panel
This panel aims at providing information at three main levels: