When do open source projects merge their pull requests?
I was curious about the merging time patterns of pull requests from open source projects. So I extracted all the merging events from Github during the month of October, and plotted them. A total of 441,927 merged pull requests were analyzed (here’s the data).
Let’s take a look into it.
You can see that there’s an interesting build up during the day.
Teams prefer to merge their pull requests during the afternoon.
As the day moves on, there is a merging build up in an interesting saw effect.
3pm seems to be the prefered time to merge.
If we turn attention to the days of the week we also see some interesting data points come out.
Developers prefer to merge on Thursdays and there’s a clear build up from Monday to Thursday and then it comes down on Friday.
There’s a surprising number of merges in the weekend. This might be something present in open source projects but maybe not true for all industry.
Looking at this chart, you can also see when features/bug fixes tend to be finished. Teams prefer to finish features on Thursday.
This might be interesting also because it shows clear preference between hours of the day and days of the week. So the next time you’re planning your sprint, bear this in mind.
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