WIP Limits
Set work-in-progress limits per team and get alerted when in-flight PRs exceed healthy thresholds.
Overview
Work-in-progress (WIP) limits are a lean engineering practice: constraining the number of simultaneously active PRs reduces context switching, speeds up cycle time, and surfaces bottlenecks earlier.
Koalr's WIP Limits page shows current in-flight PR counts per team and alerts you when a team exceeds its configured limit.
Why WIP limits matter
Research consistently shows that multitasking and task-switching are the primary causes of cycle time inflation. When engineers juggle many open PRs simultaneously:
- Each PR waits longer for reviews (reviewers are spread thin)
- Context switching between work items reduces coding quality
- Long queues accumulate, increasing batch size and deploy risk
- Teams lose visibility into what is "almost done"
Setting a WIP limit forces prioritization: finish before starting.
Configuring limits
Navigate to WIP Limits → click Edit next to any team. Set:
- PR limit — maximum open (not-yet-merged) PRs per team at one time
- Alert threshold — percentage of the limit that triggers an amber warning (default: 80%)
Changes take effect immediately. Koalr checks the current in-flight count on every data sync (every 15 minutes).
Reading the dashboard
Per-team status cards
Each team card shows:
- Current open PR count vs. limit (e.g.,
7 / 5) - Status badge: 🟢 Under limit, 🟡 Near limit, 🔴 Over limit
- Oldest open PR with author name and days open
- Trend: how the count has changed in the last 7 days
Organization summary
The top of the page shows:
- Total in-flight PRs across all teams
- Number of teams currently over limit
- Average WIP per team
Historical WIP trend
A 30-day chart shows daily in-flight PR count per team. Look for sustained high periods — these often correlate with slower-than-usual deployments visible in DORA Metrics.
Recommended WIP limits
| Team size | Recommended PR limit |
|---|---|
| 1–3 engineers | 3–5 |
| 4–6 engineers | 5–8 |
| 7–10 engineers | 8–12 |
| 10+ engineers | Scale by subteam, not headcount |
These are starting points. After 4 weeks, review your Cycle Time Bottleneck chart — if cycle time is still high, lower the limit further.
Slack alerts
When a team exceeds its WIP limit, Koalr can post a Slack alert to your configured channel. Enable this in Settings → Notifications.
Alert format:
⚠️ Platform team has 8 open PRs (limit: 5). Consider finishing before starting new work.