On 6 Dec 2016, at 10:42, abdullah alamoudi wrote:
I would like to stress one point though: Having no comments after a
timeout (72hr) means that the reviewer couldn't find time to do the
review. In which case, the change owner needs to be extra careful as
the whole blame will be on them if their change breaks something. If
you're not totally sure about your change and are not testing every
little possible case, you can still insist on a review.
One issue that comes to mind is: what if someone's changes
continuously break things?
Of course we can't revoke commit privileges (Can we?) but what we can
do is:
1. pay more attention to changes submitted by people who's changes
break more often.
2. increase the timeout period for them "temporarily" 72->96->120.....
If you don't like this, don't make bad changes.
3. MOST IMPORTANTLY, all of us should strive to have better test
coverage to automatically detect breaks caused by wild changes.
Wow, that went quickly from suggesting expectations for a review
timeframe to revoking commit privileges …
Doesn’t seem to be the "Apache Way" …
On Dec 6, 2016, at 10:33 AM, abdullah alamoudi <[email protected]>
wrote:
Ceej,
You spoke my mind and I agree with every word. I believe the way to
go is smoother code review process (maybe through time limit) and
more focus on automated testing. One thing we could do is:
If the 72 hours period pass with no comments, we look at the code
coverage and how much it improved and based on that, either allow the
change in or deny it. This will push change submitters to add tests
to increase coverage even before the 72h limit passes. This doesn't
remove the responsibility of doing the review. The review is still to
be done. However as Ceej said: One of the goals of doing the reviews
is to catch large scale design errors. Those I think still need
humans to look at but they can be caught fairly quickly with minimal
effort.
As for spreading the knowledge, will leave that to a different
discussion. I will end this with some tweets about code simplicity
and changes taken from Max Kanat-Alexander, author of Code
Simplicity:
1. You don't have to be perfect. If you make a bad change, just fix
it. (mistakes will happen with or without reviews)
2. If somebody is improving code quality, don't shoot them down
because their improvement isn't perfect. (to reviewers)
3. The point is to have a maintainable system, not to show how clever
you are. (to submitters)
4. Code quality isn't something you fix once and it stays good
forever. It's something you learn to do and continue doing.
5. Engineers don't beg, "Please let me build a bridge that will stay
up." You shouldn't need permission to write good software.
6. Anybody who tells you that you can fix years of bad code in months
or days is a liar.
7. Even huge codebases can be refactored incrementally.
8. Sometimes a refactoring will break something. Often, this proves
that the code was too fragile and so needed the refactoring!
9. If your code "works," but it's an unstable pile of complexity, do
you feel good about it?
10. Refactoring is often easier and more rewarding than you expect.
11. Don't try to write "perfect" code, just write *better* code until
you have *good* code.
12. Don't worry about how to do the perfect refactoring. Just keep
improving the code in small steps.
I am glad we're talking about this. Cheers,
~Abdullah.
On 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
