> I became curious with these statements regarding self-review 
> (committer==reviewer) and so I ran a couple
> of queries against the gerrit database to see how often this occurs:
>
> 1) For the puppet repo, 84.1% of the commits is self-reviewed.
> 2) For the mediawiki core repo, 27.9%  of the commits is self-reviewed.

I'm actually very surprised to see such a high number for MediaWiki
core. Why is this the case?

When you say committer==reviewer, so do you mean the reviewer did a +2
and merged? Does this take into account committers that also just
added comments?

> 3) For the mediawiki extensions repos, 67.8%  of the commits is self-reviewed.
>

This doesn't surprise me at all. I have a *really* hard time getting
my extensions reviewed and I work for the foundation. I have to beg
for reviews, and even then it can take up to a couple weeks sometimes.
It's problematic.

That said, I don't necessarily think my extensions need pre-merge
review. I'd really like Gerrit to support post-merge review in some
fashion.

> I think we need to take a step back from a tool-focused discussion and first 
> hash out what our commit workflows are / should be. In particular:
>
> 1) Should there be one commit workflow that applies to all teams? Looking at 
> current practise, the answer seems to be no but I am curious to hear what 
> other people think. If the answer is that it's okay for different teams to 
> have different commit workflows, then we should also look for tools that 
> support this.
>

Things that are going into production should be reviewed, preferably
pre-merge. It should definitely be reviewed before deployment.
Insecure code on a wikimedia.org domain has the ability to affect
everything else too.

> 2) If self-review is so prevalent, does that mean that the pre-commit review 
> workflow has failed?
>

Self-review is so prevalent in puppet because it's very difficult to
do operations any other way. We occasionally do 50-100 deployments a
day. Labs isn't a fully functional replica of everything in production
yet, either, so we have no way to stage deployments, which means we
can't wait on reviews.

That said, pre-merge review is working exactly as intended. The fact
that nearly 20% of the merges are reviewed shows exactly how well it's
working. If you take a look at that more closely, I'm betting you'll
see that those commits are almost completely outside of the operations
staff. That's an amazingly huge win for a team that had 0 merged
commits outside of the operations staff. This process simply wouldn't
work without pre-merge review.

- Ryan

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