Throughput tracks the number of pull requests merged per week. It is the simplest measure of how much work your team is completing and shipping.
What Periscope tracks
Periscope counts merged PRs from your monitored GitHub repositories. The dashboard shows:
- Total PRs merged in the selected time period
- Average PRs per week
- Weekly breakdown showing the merge count for each week
How it is calculated
Periscope counts distinct pull_request merge events grouped by the ISO week of the mergedAt timestamp. Only PRs to monitored repositories are included.
Interpreting the data
- Consistent throughput week over week is a sign of healthy, predictable delivery.
- Sudden drops may indicate blockers, team holidays, planning sprints, or context switching.
- Gradual decline could signal accumulating tech debt, increasing PR size (fewer but larger PRs), or reduced team capacity.
- Spikes often correspond to deadline-driven work or sprint boundaries.
Throughput is most useful when viewed alongside cycle time. If throughput is high but cycle time is also high, the team may be merging large, long-lived PRs rather than shipping small changes quickly.
Throughput vs deployment frequency
| Metric | What it counts | Tells you… |
|---|
| Throughput | Merged PRs per week | How much code is being completed |
| Deployment frequency | Production deploys per week | How much code is reaching users |
get_throughput(time_range: "30d")
