Open Stack

On 10/16/2013 01:45 AM, Vishvananda Ishaya wrote:
> Hi Sean,
>
> I'm going to top post because my response is general. I totally agree that we need people that understand the code base and we should encourage new people to be cross-functional. I guess my main issue is with how we get there. I believe in encouragment over punishment. In my mind giving people autonomy and control encourages them to contribute more.
>
> In my opinion giving the driver developers control over their own code will lead to higher quality drivers. Yes, we risk integration issues, lack of test coverage, and buggy implementations, but it is my opinion that the increased velocity that the developers will enjoy will mean faster bug fixes and more opportunity to improve the drivers.

My experience reviewing a ton of driver code in grizzly makes me 
disagree 
(http://stackalytics.com/?release=grizzly&metric=marks&project_type=core&module=nova&company=&user_id=). 


Driver code tends to drift from the norm because the teams don't mix 
much with the rest of core. This makes it even harder to review their 
code because those teams aren't realizing what makes patches easy to 
review, by getting first hand experience reviewing lots of other 
people's code, and thinking to themselves "man, that was hard to wrap my 
head around, how would I do that better if it was my patch?".

> I also think lowering the amount of code that nova-core has to keep an eye on will improve the review velocity of the rest of the code as well.

I think it would be at best a short term gain, completely offset by the 
fact that there are less eyes in the pool and I don't think would solve 
anything. If that were true the merge rate on smaller projects in 
OpenStack would far exceed Nova, and the numbers don't support that. My 
experience on a bunch of smaller trees that I've got +2 on are that 
review starvation actually hits them much worse.

So, again, it's about perspective.

Can we do better on review turn around? sure.

Would it be better if -core team members were spending more time on 
reviews? yes.

Would it be better if everyone spent time on reviews? yes.

Will driver teams getting real CI results posted back help? definitely.

Will an updated Gerrit that lets us do better dashboards so we don't 
loose reviews help? yes.

But OpenStack still moves crazy fast, and making process changes with 
sweeping future implications is something that needs to not be done 
lightly. And there are lots of other things to be done to make this 
better, which all kinds of people can help with.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net