[gmx-developers] Changes without reviews

[Schulz, Roland]

Hi,

It seems to me based on my observations (no statistics so likely biased), we have a high inefficiency in that we have certain patches which go months without code review, and the author is forced to regularly rebase because anything not on the first page of gerrit is likely to go unnoticed.
If that's true, it seems we should have some way:

-          As an owner to find out whether a change will ever get reviewed or whether the owner should abandon it because it doesn't have enough interest for it to go in.

-          Have a more efficient way of communicating that changes aren't abandoned and are in need of code review which doesn't require regularly rebasing them just to get noticed.

Based on these observation, I suggestion the following:

-          We should make the reviewer list on a change useful. Currently we have changes which haven't seen any significant review in months and have a lot of reviewers listed. I suggest, being listed as a reviewer on a change starts to mean one has the intention of reviewing it fully with voting in a timely manner (e.g. within a week for a small change or incremental reviews and within a month for a large initial review). If one is added as a reviewer (either because someone else added one or  one has commented in the past) and one doesn't have sufficient time or interest in the topic to do a full review in a timely manner or doesn't feel qualified to vote, one should remove oneself from the reviewer list. This would allow us to find out as a reviewer: are there changes which require reviewers and which changes am I expected to review. And as an owner: should I ask for reviews or (after having asked) is there no interest and I might need to abandon the idea.

-          We should use the dashboard to check for incoming reviews rather than primarily using the first page. We should usually start reviewing with the oldest rather the newest changes (requires us to either clean up all the old changes or have a start-date for the policy).

-          We should encourage owners to add others as reviewers to ask them for review (if we notice some people get spammed we might need some suggestions of how to avoid that). This makes it clear if there is no interest if everyone removes themselves. And either lets the owner abandon it or ask for more clarification regarding interest per email.

-          We could potentially improve the dashboard with extensions such as https://github.com/openstack/gerrit-dash-creator

Do you think a change in the direction would be useful (which should probably decide on the direction before discussing details such as what "timely" means)? Or do have different observations and/or suggestions?

TLDR: Should every reviewer one a change be expected to review in a timely manner or remove themselves as reviewer from the change?

Roland


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