Open Stack

Robert Collins wrote:
> So I'd like to throw two ideas into the mix.
> 
> Firstly, consider having a rota - ideally 24x5 but that will need some
> more geographical coverage I suspect for many projects - of folk who
> spend a dedicated time period only reviewing.

We have been doing that in the past for Nova, with little success. The
reason why "reviewday" is called "reviewday" is because... well... there
were review days.

The wiki page was a bit eaten by the wiki conversion, but you can still
read it at:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Nova/ReviewDays

In the end, a strict rotation didn't work out because people just didn't
review on their review day, but rather when they have one hour free
waiting for a patch to pass gate or whatever. In the end, the rotation
gave us way worse results than random ad-hoc reviewing, because people
would stop reviewing on days other than their review day, and would
regularly skip their review day altogether.

Furthermore, there is some specialization going on: I prefer the two Xen
experts in nova-core to review one hour every two days rather than one
day every two weeks... because then Xen patches get better review
roundtrip times.

So I'm not convinced *at all* that a reboot of this would yield better
results.

> Launchpad [the
> project, not the site] did this with considerable success : every
> qualified reviewer committed to a time slot and didn't *try* to code -
> they focused on reviews.

The key difference is that "every qualified reviewer" was employed by
the same company, and the review day was enforced by their management.
The amount of patches is also significantly lower, and there is less
specialization effect.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)