Team Dependencies
Visualize cross-team handoffs, blocking relationships, and critical path bottlenecks to reduce coordination overhead.
Overview
The Team Dependencies page maps which teams regularly depend on each other to ship features, identifies handoff delays, and surfaces the "critical path" teams whose blocking score is disproportionately high.
Koalr computes dependencies by analyzing cross-team pull requests — PRs where the author and one or more reviewers belong to different teams.
Metrics
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Friction Factor | Composite score (0–10) measuring cross-team coordination overhead. Lower is better. |
| Cross-Team PR Count | Number of PRs in the period that required review across team boundaries. |
| Avg Handoff Delay | Median time (hours) between a PR being opened by one team and reviewed by another. |
| Critical Path Teams | Teams whose blocking score is ≥ 1.5× the mean — the top bottlenecks. |
Dependency Graph
The interactive force-directed graph shows:
- Nodes — each team in your organization
- Edges — a directed arrow from Team A → Team B means Team A's PRs frequently wait on Team B for review
- Edge weight — thickness reflects PR volume; hover to see exact counts and average wait time
Use this graph to spot "hub" teams that block many others and consider whether load can be redistributed.
Blocking Relationships Table
The blocking relationships table ranks every team pair by handoff delay. Each row shows:
- From team → To team — direction of dependency
- PR count — how many cross-team PRs flowed in this direction
- Avg wait time — median hours from PR opened to first cross-team review
- Status indicator — 🟢 < 4h, 🟡 4–24h, 🔴 > 24h
Critical Path Score
The critical path score measures how often a team appears on the critical path of blocked work chains. A high critical path score means other teams cannot ship until that team responds.
Critical teams are flagged with an alert banner at the top of the page when any team scores ≥ 1.5× the org mean.
Time Range
Select 7, 14, 30, or 90 days using the period picker. Longer windows smooth out short-term variation and are recommended for planning conversations.
How to Reduce Cross-Team Friction
- Redistribute review responsibilities — if one team is a bottleneck, consider adding cross-team code owners to files they frequently review
- Set SLA expectations — use the Platform SLA page to set and track review-time targets
- Identify repeating patterns — if Team A always waits on Team B for the same file paths, update CODEOWNERS to give Team A write access
- Reduce shared components — high dependency counts between teams often indicate tightly-coupled modules that could be extracted into shared libraries