Smarter GitHub Workflow: Best Practices for Managing Code, PRs, and Branches with Real Data
Branching strategies and pull request workflows are foundational to every engineering team — but they’re often designed around tradition, not evidence. Teams stick to the Git flow they’ve always used. Review cycles feel rushed or clogged. Branches hang around too long. Everyone feels the friction, but no one’s quite sure where it’s coming from.
GitHub gives us the raw activity. Gitlights turns that activity into insight — so teams can identify bottlenecks, rebalance effort, and improve collaboration with minimal process overhead.
In this guide, we’ll walk through practical ways to use GitHub data (via Gitlights) to improve how your team manages code, pull requests, and branches — without adding complexity or micromanagement.
1. Review Times: Watch for Lag, Not Just Volume
Most teams measure PR volume (how many are opened or merged). That’s easy, but it misses the point. What matters more is time to first review and time to merge.
In Gitlights, the pull request dashboard shows median and outlier review times per repo and per team. Patterns to watch for:
- PRs waiting more than 24h for a first review — often a sign of overload or unclear ownership
- Reviews taking longer than merges — which may indicate rushed merges or low-quality approvals
- PRs merged with no reviews — worth checking if the repo policy allows or encourages this
Tip: Don’t set arbitrary SLAs. Instead, benchmark against your team’s baseline. If reviews are usually fast but suddenly slow down, that’s your signal.
2. Manage Branch Staleness Proactively
Stale branches aren’t just annoying — they’re risk multipliers. Long-lived branches diverge from main, increase merge conflict likelihood, and often represent work that’s blocked, abandoned, or forgotten.
Gitlights identifies branches with no activity over time (customizable, e.g. 7+ or 14+ days). Reviewing this weekly helps you:
- Identify abandoned efforts that should be cleaned up
- Spot work that might be stuck waiting for feedback or clarification
- Encourage smaller, faster-delivering units of work
Best practice: Use this dashboard in sprint reviews or retros. Ask: “Why did this branch sit idle?” and not “Who dropped the ball?”. The goal is shared accountability, not blame.
3. Normalize Smaller, Focused PRs
Review friction often comes from PRs that are too big, too complex, or too ambiguous. One of the easiest improvements is simply setting a team norm around PR size and scope.
Gitlights helps track PR size (lines changed, number of files, number of commits) and shows how size correlates with review duration or merge success.
Watch for patterns like:
- Large PRs taking significantly longer to review or merge
- Small PRs that are instantly approved (could indicate rubber-stamping)
- High-comment PRs that reveal unclear intentions or coupling of multiple concerns
Practice: Ask engineers to document intent clearly and split PRs when in doubt. Use data to reinforce the idea, not to enforce it rigidly.
4. Make Collaboration Visible (and Equitable)
One of Gitlights’ unique strengths is its ability to visualize review relationships: who reviews whom, how often, and how fast.
This graph reveals powerful patterns:
- Senior engineers reviewing a wide net of contributors
- New hires who aren’t yet being pulled into reviews
- Review bottlenecks concentrated on a few “go-to” reviewers
How to use it: Bring the collaboration graph to retro and ask: “Are we reviewing fairly across the team?” or “Who could we empower to review more often?”
This helps spread knowledge and build confidence — especially for mid-level and junior devs looking to grow technically.
5. Use Investment Balance to Tune Strategy
What’s your team really working on? Features? Bugs? Debt? Security?
The investment balance dashboard in Gitlights breaks down commits and PRs into key categories. Use this data to:
- Balance long-term initiatives (refactoring, platform work) with short-term delivery
- Spot unhealthy patterns, like excessive bug fixing or chronic underinvestment in tests
- Support strategic conversations with product and leadership using clear evidence
Example: “Only 12% of our last 6 weeks has gone to new development. Let’s realign expectations on roadmap velocity.”
6. Periodically Review the Data, Not the People
None of these dashboards are about individual evaluation. They’re system mirrors. They help you understand the flow of work, the health of process, and the direction of your efforts.
Set a cadence — every 2 weeks, monthly, per sprint — to look at:
- Review time distribution
- Branch staleness trends
- Shifts in investment categories
- Changes in collaboration dynamics
Discuss what the data suggests. Ask what could be improved. Make it a habit, not a post-mortem.
Final Thought: Better Processes Start with Better Visibility
GitHub is full of clues. Gitlights turns those clues into clarity — helping teams move faster, collaborate better, and manage code with more confidence.
Best practices aren’t universal. But patterns are. And the best way to improve your workflow isn’t to guess — it’s to watch, reflect, and adapt together.