How do you catch merge requests that quietly get stuck?
Some background: I spent years in QA and later worked as a Scrum Master, so I usually see code review from the "why is this ticket still not testable" side.
One pattern I keep running into: an MR rarely fails loudly. Nobody rejects it, nobody argues. It just sits there. The author has moved on to the next ticket, the reviewer opened it once and left a comment, then sprint planning happened. Two weeks later it has merge conflicts and nobody remembers the context.
Our board never showed this. The Jira ticket said "In Review", which looked perfectly fine.
So I'm curious how other teams catch this early:
- Do you track how long MRs stay open, or only cycle time after the fact?
- Is noticing someone's job (EM, tech lead, SM), or is it on the author?
- Do you have a rule of thumb for "this has been open too long"? Two days? A week?
Genuinely interested in what worked for you, and what didn't.