As I wrote before the proposal was not such much to establish hard rules
but rather to communicate expectations. It seemed to me that hard rules
around this would not be appropriate … but maybe that’s just me.
My initial assumption was that one would start prodding the current
reviewer of choose a different reviewer if things aren’t moving along,
but there probably are a number of options.
Cheers,
Till
On 6 Dec 2016, at 10:06, Steven Jacobs wrote:
I think we definitely need a max timeout for review responses, but
that
leads immediately to the question: What is the procedure when someone
doesn't respond in time?
Continuing from Chris, if sufficient time has been given does that
imply
consent?
Steven
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 11:13 PM, Chris Hillery <[email protected]>
wrote:
It's always been my opinion that code reviews are a very
nice-to-have, but
not more than that. The real value in proposing changes for review
comes
from the automated testing that can be performed at that stage. I
think
we'd be better served overall by shoring up and expanding our
automated
testing rather than spending time discussing and implementing
non-technical
process.
The main benefits of code reviews are catching large-scale design
errors
and spreading code knowledge. You can't really have the former until
you
already have the latter - if only one person really understands an
area,
nobody else will be able to catch design errors in that area. That's
clearly a risky place to be, but IMHO at least it's not a problem
that can
be solved through rules. It requires a cultural shift from the team
to make
spreading code knowledge an actual priority, rather than someone
everyone
wants but nobody has time or interest to achieve.
If we as a team don't have the drive to do that, then we should
accept that
about ourselves and move on. You'll always do best spending time on
enhancing the strengths of a team, not fighting against the things
they
don't excel at. I'm also not trying to make any kind of value
judgment here
- software development is always about tradeoffs and compromise, risk
versus goals. Any time taken to shift focus towards spreading code
knowledge will by necessity pull from other parts of the development
process, and the upshot may well not be an overall improvement in
functionality or quality.
Ceej
aka Chris Hillery
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 10:49 PM, Till Westmann <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi,
today a few of us had a discussion about how we could make the
reviewing
process moving along a little smoother. The goal is to increase the
likeliness
that the reviews and review comments get addressed reasonably
quickly. To
do
that, the proposal is to
a) try to keep ourselves to some time limit up to which a reviewer
or
author
responds to a review or a comment and to
a) regularly report via e-mail about open reviews and how long they
have
been
open (Ian already has filed an issue to automate this [1]).
Of course one is not always able to spend the time to do a thorough
review
[2]
/ respond fully to comments, but in this case we should aim to let
the
other
participants know within the time limit that the task is not
feasible so
that
they adapt their plan accordingly.
The first proposal for the time limit would be 72h (which is taken
from
the
minimal time that a [VOTE] stays open to allow people in all
different
locations and timezones to vote).
Another goal would be to abandon reviews, if nobody seems to be
working
on
them
for a while (and we’d need to find out what "a while" could be).
Thoughts on this?
A good idea or too much process?
Is the time limit reasonable?
Please let us know what you think (ideally more than a +1 or a -1
...)
Cheers,
Till
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ASTERIXDB-1745
[2]
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ASTERIXDB/Code+Reviews
