Comment by duncanfwalker

6 months ago

> Comments per PR [...] served as a measure to gauge the depth of collaboration exhibited during the development and review process.

That sounds like a particularly poor measure - it might even be negatively correlated. I'm worked on teams that are highly aligned on principles, style and understanding of the problem domain - they got there by deep collaboration - and have few comments on PRs. I've also seen junior devs go without support and be faced with a deluge of feedback come review time.

> I'm worked on teams that are highly aligned on principles, style and understanding of the problem domain - they got there by deep collaboration - and have few comments on PRs. I've also seen junior devs go without support and be faced with a deluge of feedback come review time.

The results actually make sense then. If you look at Fig 7: the cycle time explodes as the number of PR comments goes up. This seems like a symptom that the developers weren't aligned before the PR.

It gels with my personal experience where controversial changes in a PR gum up the works and trigger long comment threads and meetings.

  • 100% - for me the fact that hasn't been picked up throughout the research undermines the credibility of the rest of the paper.