[openstack-dev] [nova] An analysis of code review in Nova

Davanum Srinivas davanum at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 18:55:54 UTC 2014


As was brought up on the IRC, +1 to refactor/rebase the code and adopt
oslo.vmware in the process as well. The downside is a hit/rebase to
all the reviews in progress. I strongly believe this is the right time
to do this.

-- dims

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Matt Riedemann
<mriedem at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 2/25/2014 6:36 AM, Matthew Booth wrote:
>>
>> I'm new to Nova. After some frustration with the review process,
>> specifically in the VMware driver, I decided to try to visualise how the
>> review process is working across Nova. To that end, I've created 2
>> graphs, both attached to this mail.
>>
>> Both graphs show a nova directory tree pruned at the point that a
>> directory contains less than 2% of total LOCs. Additionally, /tests and
>> /locale are pruned as they make the resulting graph much busier without
>> adding a great deal of useful information. The data for both graphs was
>> generated from the most recent 1000 changes in gerrit on Monday 24th Feb
>> 2014. This includes all pending changes, just over 500, and just under
>> 500 recently merged changes.
>>
>> pending.svg shows the percentage of LOCs which have an outstanding
>> change against them. This is one measure of how hard it is to write new
>> code in Nova.
>>
>> merged.svg shows the average length of time between the
>> ultimately-accepted version of a change being pushed and being approved.
>>
>> Note that there are inaccuracies in these graphs, but they should be
>> mostly good. Details of generation here:
>> https://github.com/mdbooth/heatmap. This code is obviously
>> single-purpose, but is free for re-use if anyone feels so inclined.
>>
>> The first graph above (pending.svg) is the one I was most interested in,
>> and shows exactly what I expected it to. Note the size of 'vmwareapi'.
>> If you check out Nova master, 24% of the vmwareapi driver has an
>> outstanding change against it. It is practically impossible to write new
>> code in vmwareapi without stomping on an oustanding patch. Compare that
>> to the libvirt driver at a much healthier 3%.
>>
>> The second graph (merged.svg) is an attempt to look at why that is.
>> Again comparing the VMware driver with the libvirt we can see that at 12
>> days, it takes much longer for a change to be approved in the VMware
>> driver than in the libvirt driver. I suspect that this isn't the whole
>> story, which is likely a combination of a much longer review time with
>> very active development.
>>
>> What's the impact of this? As I said above, it obviously makes it very
>> hard to come in as a new developer of the VMware driver when almost a
>> quarter of it has been rewritten, but you can't see it. I am very new to
>> this and others should validate my conclusions, but I also believe this
>> is having a detrimental impact to code quality. Remember that the above
>> 12 day approval is only the time for the final version to be approved.
>> If a change goes through multiple versions, each of those also has an
>> increased review period, meaning that the time from first submission to
>> final inclusion is typically very, very protracted. The VMware driver
>> has its fair share of high priority issues and functionality gaps, and
>> the developers are motived to get it in the best possible shape as
>> quickly as possible. However, it is my impression that when problems
>> stem from structural issues, the developers choose to add metaphorical
>> gaffer tape rather than fix them, because fixing both creates a
>> dependency chain which pushes the user-visible fix months into the
>> future. In this respect the review process is dysfunctional, and is
>> actively detrimental to code quality.
>>
>> Unfortunately I'm not yet sufficiently familiar with the project to
>> offer a solution. A core reviewer who regularly looks at it is an
>> obvious fix. A less obvious fix might involve a process which allows
>> developers to work on a fork which is periodically merged, rather like
>> the kernel.
>>
>> Matt
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> OpenStack-dev mailing list
>> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>>
>
> When I originally read this I had some ideas in mind for a response
> regarding review latency with the vmware driver patches, but felt like
> anything I said, albeit what I consider honest, would sound bad/offensive in
> some way, and didn't want to convey that.
>
> But this came up in IRC today:
>
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/vmware-spawn-refactor
>
> That spurred some discussion around this same topic and I think highlights
> one of the major issues, which is code quality and the design of the driver.
>
> For example, the driver's spawn method is huge and there are a lot of nested
> methods within it.  There are a lot of vmware patches and a lot of
> blueprints, and a lot of them touch spawn.  When I'm reviewing them, I'm
> looking for new conditions and checking to see if those are unit tested
> (positive/error cases) and a lot of the time I find it very difficult to
> tell if they are or not.  I think a lot of that has to do with how the
> vmware tests are scaffolded with fakes to simulate a vcenter backend, but it
> makes it very difficult if you're not extremely familiar with that code to
> know if something is covered or not.
>
> And I've actually asked in bp reviews before, 'you have this new/changed
> condition, where is it tested' and the response is more or less 'we plan on
> refactoring this later and will add unit tests then' or 'it's hard to test
> this path without a lot of changes to how the tests are working'. That's
> unacceptable to me, and I generally give up on the review after that.
>
> So to move this all forward, I think that bp above should be top priority
> for the vmware team in Juno to keep bp patches moving at the pace they do,
> because the features and refactoring just keeps coming and at least for me
> it's very hard to burn out on looking at those reviews.
>
> --
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matt Riedemann
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-dev mailing list
> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev



-- 
Davanum Srinivas :: http://davanum.wordpress.com



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