GitHub user xpinc17 created a discussion: Read-only PR review timing brief for Airflow: long-tail review waits
Hi Airflow maintainers, I put together a short read-only PR review timing brief for `apache/airflow`, based only on public GitHub data. Nothing was installed, and nothing was posted or changed in the repo. This is not meant as a criticism of the project. Airflow has a very active PR queue, so I was curious whether a lightweight historical read could surface any useful long-tail review patterns. ## What stood out For PRs created between **2026-05-29 and 2026-06-08**: | Metric | Observed value | | --- | ---: | | PRs analyzed | 458 | | PRs waiting >48h for first review | 29 | | Approved PRs idle >48h after last approval | 19 | | Total review-wait, cumulative across PRs | 101.2 PR-days | | Median first-review wait | 2.2h | The median first-review wait looks healthy, but there is still a visible long tail: some PRs waited several days for first review, and some approved PRs remained unmerged for more than 48h. ## Longest observed first-review waits These are longest observed waits in this window, not typical PRs: - [#67675](https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/67675) — 7.6 days - [#67724](https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/67724) — 154.9h - [#67730](https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/67730) — 125.4h ## Why I’m sharing The main pattern is not “reviews are slow” overall. It is more specific: in a very active repo, aging review items can fall out of view even when the typical PR moves quickly. ApprovalOps is a small tool I’m building to surface those aging review items earlier. In this historical window, it would have flagged an estimated **40% of observable review-wait time** earlier, about **40.1 cumulative PR-days**. That is a retrospective estimate, not a guarantee. ## Caveats - This is based only on public GitHub data. - It does not know internal maintainer context, reviewer load, branch protection, or project policy. - Aggregate first-review metrics may use merge or close time as a fallback when no first-review timestamp is visible. - The examples above only include PRs with observed first-review timestamps. If this is useful, I’m happy to share the methodology or run the same read-only brief for a different timeframe. GitHub link: https://github.com/apache/airflow/discussions/68196 ---- This is an automatically sent email for [email protected]. To unsubscribe, please send an email to: [email protected]
