Atlassian reports that since it built and adopted Rovo Dev in early 2025, it cut its PR cycle time by 45%, more than a full day. Rovo Dev is now the automated first reviewer on every PR, reducing wait time for reviews, reducing the overall PR backlog, and freeing the team to focus on reviewing larger, more critical code changes. New Atlassian engineers who used Rovo Dev merged their first PR five days faster than those who did not. Atlassian found that 26% of the total PR cycle time came from an engineer waiting for the first code review comment, an average of 18 hours, and with Rovo Dev that wait time was cut to 0.
"We had a PR problem at Atlassian. Our median time from PR to merge had crept up to over 3 days, with engineers waiting an average of 18 hours just to get that first review comment," wrote Taroon Mandhana, CTO, AI & Teamwork, in Atlassian's blog post. He added that while developers can now generate code and PRs faster than ever, Atlassian still has only a fixed number of senior engineers able to review them, so the bottleneck for assessing whether a PR is production-ready and meets the original requirements was getting worse.
The post names three challenges in code review. Reviews often got stuck in back-and-forth over small issues such as code consistency, typos and stylistic problems. At Atlassian's scale, engineers sometimes forget to follow engineering standards even when their code technically works. And engineers sometimes forget to check whether the code meets the feature requirements.
Atlassian's Developer AI team turned to Rovo Dev, Atlassian's developer agent with context of the entire Atlassian platform, available in Bitbucket, GitHub, IDEs, and the CLI. Built on LLMs, it automatically reviews any PR commit for typos, logic errors, anti-patterns and potential bugs, and surfaces code suggestions that engineers can accept with one click. As part of automatic code review, it pulls from Confluence documents that hold customized standards for a repo, a project or the whole company, and checks that PRs match them, including lint rules, preferred design patterns, security and compliance policies, and API contracts. Because it is part of the Atlassian platform, it also checks PRs against the acceptance criteria tracked in Jira work items and notifies the PR author of criteria that have not been met.
In beta, Rovo Dev cut customer PR cycle time by 32%, or by more than a day on average, from 4.18 to 2.85 days. Rovo Dev is now generally available, and Atlassian says it plans to iterate in the coming months with more customized support for enforcing complex standards, improved review quality, and adding Rovo Dev's automated quality checks to more stages of the development lifecycle, such as CI/CD.
Details