Dear Developers. This mail is especially -- but no exclusively -- addressed to the novices among yourselves. I would like to take the opportunity to emphasize the importance of reviews in our process.
As you all know, we neither accept nor appreciate non-reviewed changes in our source code. This rigid process serves a dual purpose: (1) As a practice of analytic quality assurance, reviews hinder defects from being introduced into the product before it's released to the end-user. The later a defect is detected, found, and eliminated the costlier it gets. Finding bugs as early as it's (often) achieved by reviews also prevents other developers from building new patches on top of faulty code, which can be a huge pain saver. (2) Furthermore, reviews can be regarded as constructive quality assurance as well. That's because of the implicit knowledge transfer that takes place from the authoring developer to the reviewers, and vice versa. The author is encouraged to explain his thoughts to the reviewers, to justify the design decisions he made, etc. thus increasing the "truck factor" of the project -- because there are simply more people who possess knowledge of this particular part of the product. The other way around, the reviewers might be more skilled in certain areas (or simply more attentive) and may provide valuable feedback, helping the author to write better code -- now and in the future. To make my point clear: Fixing bugs, providing patches and reacting to reviews is only one way to participate in an open-source software project. But carrying out reviews yourself is another possible way to get in touch with the product, the culture, and the idiosyncrasies of a project. Your efforts will surely be appreciated. Best Regards, Franz PS: In case you have problems using our review system [1], don't hesitate to ask for help on the mailing list. We do have a developer's guide [2] which explains all important steps in detail, but it might be unclear or ambiguous in some sections. But guess what: the guide consists of easy-to-edit XML files [3] and is embedded in our review infrastructure. So feel free to provide patches for the guide itself :) [1] http://saros-build.imp.fu-berlin.de/gerrit [2] http://saros-build.imp.fu-berlin.de/sarosGettingStarted [3] git clone http://saros-build.imp.fu-berlin.de/gerrit/saros-developer-guide ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov _______________________________________________ DPP-Devel mailing list DPP-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dpp-devel
