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Reviews > Body

Tom Williams avatar
Written by Tom Williams
Updated this week

Dataset: Reviews from pull requests

Entity: Pull Request Review

Field ID: body

Type: Text

Description: The content of the review.

Source: App

From:

Github (Reviews)

body

Gitlab (MRs)

review_event.body

Bitbucket (Reviews)

None

Azure DevOps (PR Threads)

None

Jira

N/A

ClickUp

N/A

Trello

N/A

Reporting Use Cases

The Body field from the Reviews dataset contains the main summary comment a reviewer leaves when they submit their review. It is a rich source of qualitative feedback that can be analyzed to understand the nature and substance of your code review process.

  • Filtering for Specific Feedback: You can create reports that find reviews based on the content of the summary comment.

    • Find Simple Approvals: You can isolate reviews that are simple "looks good to me" approvals by using a filter like Body ~ "(?i)LGTM|Approved".

    • Identify Key Concerns: Search for reviews that mention critical topics like "security," "performance," or "deprecation" to audit how these concerns are being addressed in your review process, using a filter like Body ~ "security".

  • Providing Context in Lists: In any drilldown or list of individual reviews, including the body as a dimension is essential. It shows the reviewer's overall conclusion and provides critical context alongside the review's state (e.g., a CHANGES_REQUESTED state is much clearer when you can see the accompanying comment).

  • Custom Formulas for Categorization: You can use custom formulas to classify reviews based on their content, turning unstructured text into a valuable dimension for analysis.

    • Substantive vs. Simple Reviews: You can create a dimension to distinguish between brief approvals and more detailed feedback with a formula like IF(body ~ "(?i)lgtm|approved", "Simple Approval", "Substantive Feedback"). Using this in a pie chart can show you the ratio of in-depth reviews to simple sign-offs.

    • Counting Question-Based Reviews: You can measure how often reviews include questions (which might indicate a need for clearer PR descriptions) with a metric like COUNT_IF(body ~ "\\?").

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