Your top reviewer merged 0 PRs. Your dashboard says he did nothing.
Canopy reads your GitHub and Jira activity and writes the engineering digest your dashboard can't. Cross-referenced tickets. Actual judgment calls. What really happened.
The problem
Every metric your dashboard shows can be gamed, inflated, or misread. The story is in the details it leaves out.
Line counts reward bulk. Jira ticket counts reward filing. Neither captures the reviewer who gatekeeps 352 PRs, the contributor closing 9-year-old tickets, or the 79% of plans that never became code.
Dashboard says
chia7712: 0 PRs merged, 0 lines
What actually happened
352 code reviews, 36 Jira tickets filed. The project’s top architectural decision-maker and gatekeeper.
Dashboard says
mingyen066: 44 PRs merged
What actually happened
Systematic cleanup campaign — test migrations, typo fixes, tool updates. 0 features shipped. Invisible but essential.
Dashboard says
308 Jira tickets active
What actually happened
79% have zero GitHub PR references. Planning and shipping are two different worlds.
Dashboard says
KAFKA-5246: filed 2017, open
What actually happened
Bounced through 4 assignees over 9 years. TaiJuWu finally closed it last month.
What it does
Reads your repo and your tracker. Writes the digest.
Jira + GitHub, cross-referenced
Matches contributors across systems by name and email. Connects Jira tickets to GitHub PRs. Shows you the 79% of tickets that never became code — and the 35% of PRs that skipped planning entirely.
Judgment over volume
Distinguishes high-judgment work — 352 code reviews, architectural steering, closing 9-year-old tickets — from mechanical bulk that inflates every metric.
The invisible contributors
Finds the reviewer who merged 0 PRs but gatekept the entire project. Surfaces the 75 people active in Jira comments who never touch GitHub, and the 58 shipping code with no ticket.
Who creates vs. who ships
Tracks the full lifecycle: who filed the ticket, how many times it was reassigned, and who actually closed it. 40% of shipped work was started by someone else.
Real output
From a 30-day analysis of Apache Kafka
Not a mockup. This is actual output from cross-referencing GitHub (428 PRs) and Jira (308 tickets). 105 contributors matched across systems.
The headline
Kafka's planning system and its shipping system are two different worlds. Of 308 Jira tickets active this month, 242 have zero GitHub PR references. Of 428 GitHub PRs, 149 have no Jira ticket in the title. The overlap — where a ticket actually becomes a PR that actually gets merged — is surprisingly narrow, and the people who create tickets are almost never the people who close them.
chia7712
— The project's nervous system0 PRs merged · 352 reviews · 341 review comments · 36 Jira tickets filed · 68 Jira comments
Tsai reviewed more PRs than any other individual opened, merged, or commented on. He is simultaneously the project's top issue triager (36 Jira tickets filed, almost all assigned to other people) and its top merge gatekeeper.
The pattern: He filed KAFKA-20056 (headers in state stores), KAFKA-20130 (Docker env fix), KAFKA-20161 (sealed interface for TransactionLog) — then watched as frankvicky, clolov, DL1231, and brandboat built and shipped each one. He creates the work, reviews the work, and shapes the work, but rarely writes the code himself.
The planning gap
— Jira vs. GitHub cross-reference79%
of Jira tickets have zero GitHub PR references — planned but never started, or resolved without traceable code
35%
of PRs have no Jira ticket — the MINOR convention means small fixes deliberately skip planning
40%
of resolved tickets were shipped by someone other than the person who filed them
What a dashboard would show vs. what actually happened
| Dashboard says | What actually happened |
|---|---|
| mingyen066: 44 PRs, 3.3K lines | Systematic cleanup campaign — test migrations, typo fixes, tool updates. 0 features shipped. |
| chia7712: 0 PRs, 0 lines | 352 reviews, 36 Jira tickets filed. The project’s top architectural gatekeeper. |
| junrao: 0 PRs, 0 lines | 56 targeted reviews mentoring m1a2st and clolov. Senior committer steering invisible to metrics. |
| 308 Jira tickets active | 242 (79%) have zero GitHub PR references. Planning and shipping are different worlds. |
| 428 PRs opened | 149 (35%) have no Jira ticket. The project’s MINOR convention deliberately skips planning. |
| clolov: 5.3K lines added | Net-negative: 6.1K lines deleted. 4-year test modernization campaign across 25+ PRs on one ticket. |
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Engineering digests, not dashboards.