Open Stack

On 24/04/15 07:21, Amrith Kumar wrote:
> Julien,
>
> We had a similar discussion within Trove several months ago and agreed to a convention that if you have a question, that should not warrant a -1 unless, as you indicate there's a strong reason to believe that the code is wrong and the question is leading.

+1. I'm kind of shocked that this even needed to be discussed, but well 
done :)

> We discussed this at a mid-cycle and agreed to put our conventions in CONTRIBUTING.rst[1].
>
> We had a hypothesis about why +0 was rarely used (never conclusively proved). Our hypothesis was that since Stackalytics didn't count +0's it led to an increased propensity to -1 something. It would be wonderful if we could try the experiment of giving credit for 0's and seeing if it changes behavior.

IIRC the problem here is the Gerrit API - it doesn't count +0 as a 
'review', so they just don't show up in any automated tools. (This isn't 
easily solved either, even assuming you're willing to modify Gerrit.)

There's nothing quite so antisocial as obstructing someone else's work 
to juice your own stats, and it's good to (gently) remind everyone of 
that occasionally.

> It may be relevant to note that one of the recent candidates for TC also cited the possibility that a change in stackalytics was a causal factor in the change in behavior re: commits and reviews[2].
>
> Maybe this is something that the new TC candidates can opine on; are these kinds of metrics driving bad behavior and if so what, if anything, can the TC do about it?

Individualised closed-loop metrics *always* drive bad behaviour, because 
they're necessarily only a sample of the behaviour we care about and to 
the extent that sample is representative of the whole, it can only 
remain so in the open-loop case. So we can, and should, tweak metrics to 
reduce bad behaviour and encourage good behaviour, but we shouldn't kid 
ourselves that we can eliminate unintended consequences - we can only 
exchange them for _different_ unintended consequences.

This is an open community, so we can't (and shouldn't want to) prevent 
people from publishing stats. The best case is that we use them only to 
inform us how we're doing in the aggregate, and discourage companies in 
particular from attaching individual incentives to game the metrics. 
Members of the TC, at least, (I don't know that there was ever an 
official edict or anything) have expressed this in the past, and I think 
it's one of those things that requires vigilance and periodic reminders.

cheers,
Zane.

> -amrith
>
> [1] https://github.com/openstack/trove/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst
> {2] http://openstack.markmail.org/thread/2xfapsmyy5i44adj
>
> | -----Original Message-----
> | From: Gorka Eguileor [mailto:geguileo at redhat.com]
> | Sent: Friday, April 24, 2015 4:29 AM
> | To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> | Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Please stop reviewing code while asking
> | questions
> |
> | On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 10:14:38AM +0200, Julien Danjou wrote:
> | > Hi there,
> | >
> | > This is now happening weekly to me now, probably because I write too
> | > many patches touching almost all OpenStack projects once a cycle, and
> | > I'm really tired of that behavior, so PLEASE:
> | >
> | >   *Stop sending Code-Review-1 when asking a question in a patch*
> | >
> | > _Sometimes_ there are good reasons to set -1 even when asking a
> | > question. For example, when the question is a hint sent to the patch
> | > author so that (s)he improves is commit message, a code comment or a
> | > piece of code.
> | >
> | > But most of the time, if you ask a question because there's something
> | > YOU DO NOT KNOW OR UNDERSTAND, do not put a score to a patchset. You
> | > don't know the answer, so you have absolutely no right to evaluate a
> | > patchset with -1. Just don't set a score, it's OK, and wait for the
> | > answer before deciding if the patch is worth [-1..+2].
> | >
> | > Thank you for listening, and happy hacking!
> | >
> | > --
> | > Julien Danjou
> | > ;; Free Software hacker
> | > ;; http://julien.danjou.info
> |
> | +1
> |
> | It does bother me too, especially when you answer the question and you
> | never hear back from them and the -1 stays there...  XD
> |
> |
> | Gorka
> |
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