On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 at 07:58, Giuseppe Lavagetto <glavage...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The amount of noise will prevent me from being able to notice anyone's > review request. I think it's going to be the same for other developers - I > don't want to imagine what the inbox of a long-time mediawiki-core > contributor must look like! > > What I fear is that the flood of reviews will make everyone just dull to > notifications, obtaining the exact opposite effect that was intended. I say > this because I auto added myself to all reviews in operations/puppet[1] in > the past, which resulted in me ignoring all code review requests. > > Reading this thread -- and Guiseppes comment above in particular, made me think a bit on how we do code review, and how automatically adding reviewers may be counterproductive. This includes the Gerrit Reviewer Bot: even though it is opt-in, it may still overwhelm the inbox of whoever opted in, and if that person does not unsubscribe (but rather creates a filter to move all the requests into a 'I don't have time to look at this now, but I will review these later' mailbox - I have done this myself at some point, which meant that in practice, I didn't review anything for that project anymore), we end up in a situation where code is not actually reviewed in a more timely manner. One thing I wondered about is how big the problem of patches without relevant reviewers is. This is not entirely trivial to query, but the best I could come up with was looking for patches without any reviewer at all: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/status:open+-reviewerin:%2522Registered+Users%2522 . This is only a very small number of patches -- while the number of patches that have V+1 CR=0 Age > 1 month is much larger: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/status:open+label:Verified%253E%253D0+label:Code-Review%253D0+age:1month This suggests to me that the problem is not a lack of reviewers added, but a lack of reviewing :-). This might be due to the wrong reviewers being added (which an improved version of the auto-reviewer plugin could solve), but it might also just be that the reviewers don't have enough time to actually perform the reviews. That includes myself -- I find it very difficult to get started doing reviews on code I haven't looked at a while. After all, it's much more fun to write code than to review it ;-) How to solve that? I don't know -- I think initiatives such as Andre's 'Patchsets by new Gerrit contributors' emails help (as they focus on a small number of changes). The same is true for a form of gamification (such as the statistics in the previous Thank You day threads). In general, I believe that trying something new (which includes trying the Gerrit plugin!) is going to be beneficial, as otherwise we never discover which directions improve things (and which ones don't). After all, the Reviewer Bot is already 8 years old, and it's unlikely that the thing I hacked together back then is still the best solution now :-) Merlijn _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
