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What is PRs Opened vs Closed

This chart puts two weekly counts side by side: how many pull requests were opened and how many were closed in the same week. It answers a question none of the speed metrics do — is your team keeping up with its own throughput, or is work piling up faster than it gets merged?

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How We Calculate It

For every week in the selected period we count:
  • Opened — pull requests created during that week.
  • Closed — pull requests closed during that week (merged or otherwise closed).
The two are counted independently: a PR opened in one week and closed three weeks later shows up in the “opened” bar of the first week and the “closed” bar of the third. That’s deliberate — it’s what makes a backlog visible.

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How to Read It

  • Closed ≈ Opened, week after week — steady state. The team is absorbing what it takes on.
  • Opened consistently above Closed — the backlog is growing. Review capacity, not authoring capacity, is usually the constraint.
  • Closed spikes well above Opened — often a cleanup sweep: someone closed a batch of stale PRs. Worth confirming before reading it as a productivity win.
  • Both collapse at once — usually a calendar effect (holiday, freeze, incident), not a behavior change.
Read this one next to PR Cycle Time. A growing gap here with a rising cycle time is the clearest signal that reviews — not development — are the bottleneck.

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Where to Find It

Cockpit → Productivity tab, in the detailed charts section.
This chart can be hidden for your whole organization. If you don’t see it, check Cockpit Configuration.