Goals — PR Health Thresholds & Notifications
Goals help you track whether your team’s pull request (PR) and review practices are within healthy limits. You define the thresholds, LinearB watches activity, and your team gets alerted when work approaches or crosses those limits, with trends available in dashboards and reports.
TL;DR — What Goals Do
- Let you define PR health thresholds per team (size, pickup time, review time, lifecycle, and more).
- Provide a real-time estimate of how often each goal would have fired based on your historical data, so you can tune thresholds without creating noise.
- Send heads-up alerts as work approaches a threshold, and missed-goal alerts when it’s crossed.
- Allow you to choose whether notifications go to individuals or the team channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams.
- Feed into the Goals dashboard so you can monitor how often goals are met or missed over time.
Availability: Goals are configured per team from Team Settings → Goals. Chat notifications require a connected Slack or Microsoft Teams integration for that team.
Before you begin
- Git provider connected so pull requests and reviews are visible in LinearB.
- Teams configured so PRs and contributors roll up to the correct team.
- Optional: Slack or Microsoft Teams connected if you want channel and personal notifications.
Where to configure Goals
- In LinearB, select the team you want to configure at the top of the page.
- Open Team Settings from the side navigation.
- Click the Goals tab to open that team’s Goal Settings.
From this page you can adjust thresholds, control notifications, and decide which goals appear in dashboards and reports.
Configuring goal thresholds
Each goal row represents a PR health rule. Click Edit on any row to adjust its threshold. For example, under Pull Request Size, you can define the maximum number of code changes allowed before a goal is considered missed.
- Use the slider or input to set the threshold.
- A real-time estimate under the control shows how often this goal would have triggered in the past, helping you avoid over-alerting.
- Saving changes updates both future notifications and the Goals dashboards / reports that use this goal.
Available Goals
The exact set of goals may vary by workspace, but common options include:
- Pull Request Size — Alert when a PR exceeds the configured number of code changes.
- Pull Request Pickup Time — Notify when a PR waits too long for the first review.
- Pull Request Review Time — Alert when reviews take longer than the expected window.
- Pull Request Lifecycle — Limit how long a PR is allowed to stay open before it’s considered overdue.
- Merged Without Review — Flag PRs that were merged without any review activity.
- Merged with Basic Review — Detect PRs merged after only minimal review time or interaction.
- High Risk Work — Identify PRs with large changes and high rework or refactor percentages.
- Daily Digest — Send a once-per-day summary of PRs that violated one or more of the configured goals.
Notifications & visibility controls
Each goal row includes controls that determine how it behaves:
- Notification (bell) icon — Turn Slack / Microsoft Teams alerts on or off for this goal.
- Audience (speech bubble) icon — Choose whether alerts go to individuals, the team channel, or both (depending on your configuration).
- Dashboard (report) icon — Include or exclude this goal from the team’s Goals dashboard.
Heads-up vs. missed-goal notifications
- Heads-up notifications (where available) warn your team before a goal is missed — for example, when a PR has been waiting for review and is approaching the pickup-time threshold.
- Missed-goal notifications fire after the threshold is crossed, including context such as PR link, branch, and the related Jira ticket (when applicable).
Monitoring progress with the Goals Dashboard
Once goals are configured, you can track how often they’re met or missed directly from the main navigation:
- Go to Teams → Goals.
- Select the team and time frame at the top of the page.
- Review how the team performed against the goals that were configured during that window.
Use this view in retros, leadership reviews, and coaching sessions to understand whether changes to your process and review policy are improving outcomes over time.
Best practices
- Start from defaults, then tune: Begin with the standard thresholds, then adjust based on the real-time trigger estimate and feedback from your team.
- Favor a few high-impact goals: Focus on goals that drive behavior change (e.g., pickup time, review time, merged without review) before enabling everything.
- Pair with WorkerB alerts: Use goals alongside WorkerB personal and team notifications so developers see issues in the tools they already use.
- Review trends regularly: Use the Teams → Goals dashboard as part of your regular operating rhythm, not just when something goes wrong.
Troubleshooting
We’re getting too many alerts
- Open Team Settings → Goals and click Edit on the noisy goal.
- Use the real-time estimate to raise the threshold until alerts focus on genuinely risky or slow PRs.
- Consider disabling notifications for less critical goals and keeping them report-only (dashboard icon on, bell icon off).
Goals don’t appear on the Teams → Goals dashboard
- Confirm the dashboard icon is enabled in Team Settings → Goals for each goal you want to track.
- Check the selected time frame - goals only appear when there is data in the chosen period.
No Slack / Teams notifications are sent
- Verify Slack or Microsoft Teams is connected for your workspace and mapped to the team.
- Confirm the notification (bell) icon is enabled for the goal and that the chosen channel is active.
Need help tuning thresholds or aligning Goals with your review policy?
Contact LinearB Support.