Open Stack

I'm not expressing myself cleary enough. I don't advocate for the
removal of anything because I like pretty charts. I'm changing the
subject to be even more clear.

On Fri, 2015-02-27 at 13:26 -0800, James E. Blair wrote:
> I am asking you to please independently remove changes that you don't
> think should be considered from your metrics.  

I'm saying that the reports have indicators that seem to show struggle.
In a previous message Kevin hinted that probably a reason for those bad
looking numbers was due to "a lot of reviews that appear to have been
abandoned". This doesn't seem the case because some projects have a
habit of 'purging'. 

I have never explicitly ordered developers to purge anything. If their
decision to purge is due to the numbers they may have seen on the
reports I'd like to know. 

That said, the problem that the reports highlight remains confirmed so
far: contributors seem to be left in some cases hanging, for many many
days, *after a comment* and they don't come back.

> I think abandoning changes so that the metrics look the way we want is a
> terrible experience for contributors.

I agree, that should not be a motivator. Also, after chatting with you
on IRC I tend to think that instead of abandoning the review we should
highlight them and have humans act on them. Maybe build a dashboard of
'old stuff' to periodically sift through and see if there are things
worth picking up again or to ping the owner or something else managed by
humans. 

I happened to have found one of such review automatically closed that
could have been fixed with a trivial edit in commit message instead:

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/98735/

(that owner had a bunch of auto-abandoned patches 
https://review.openstack.org/#/q/owner:%22Mh+Raies+%253Craiesmh08%
2540gmail.com%253E%22,n,z). I have made a note to reach out to him and
get more anecdotes.

> Especially as it appears some projects, such as nova, are in a position
> where they are actually leaving -2 votes on changes which will not be
> lifted for 2 or 3 months.  That means that if someone runs a script like
> Sean's, these changes will be abandoned, yet there is nothing that the
> submitter can do to progress the change in the mean time.  Abandoning
> such a review is making an already bad experience for contributors even
> worse.

this sounds like a different issue :(