Hi, our metrics are reflecting a sudden growth of unreviewed changes in
Gerrit. Your attention and interpretations are welcome.

http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/gerrit_review_queue.html

Look at the green line in the first graph, "Volume of open changesets". It
shows the number of open changesets waiting for a review (WIP and -1 are
excluded). In the last months, the number of changesets waiting for review
has gone from 311 (June) to 529 (July) and 790 (August).

The increase is so high that first I thought the problem was in the metric,
but Alvaro has reviewed the raw data and says that the metric is legit.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70278

Trying to find an explanation, I went to the MediaWiki Core repository, and
there are some inusual curves there as well:

http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/repository.html?repository=gerrit.wikimedia.org_mediawiki_core

However, not even these numbers alone would explain the increase.

Has there been an unusual activity (or lack of reviews) in Gerrit or are we
missing an important detail in the metrics?

(pause)

In any case, in the past weeks I have been chasing old open reviews and in
general I get the impression that developers/maintainers are too busy to
review so many contributions. The tricky part is that many (most?) of those
contributions come from the same developers/maintainers...

Simplifying a lot the picture, it looks as if we can't review code because
we are busy writing code that won't be reviewed because we are busy writing
code that won't be reviewed because... I'm sure this representation is
unfair, but you get the point.

In many cases, unreviewed patches rotting mean real resources put into
waste -- right? Maybe teams should prioritize the attention to open
changesets at the expense of writing new code themselves? It's a real
question and I won't pretend to have an answer. Different teams and
repositories probably have different answers.

-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Reply via email to