[teampractices] Patch review culture of Wikimedia teams

[Alex Monk]

First, +1 to everything Brion said.

On 8 March 2016 at 18:44, Dan Garry <dgarry at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 7 March 2016 at 05:16, Andre Klapper <aklapper at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> Apart from whether that statement is true or not:
>> Does the Team Practices Group encourage regular Gerrit patch backlog
>> grooming? If so, how, and is there any documentation available, or even
>> data which teams perform better or worse? Is there any differentiation
>> between "internal" patches by team members vs. contributed patches?
>>
>
> I personally keep an eye on incoming patches to the projects I'm working
> on, and prod the tech lead to make sure that any patches from external
> contributors get reviewed promptly. If anything, this leads to patches from
> external contributors getting reviewed faster than patches from others.
>
Whilst your efforts are, of course, commendable, this situation is not
completely ideal. I'd be wary of over-prioritising reviews too much because
someone external (as far as the org chart goes) uploaded the patch. I also
worry that calling out specific patches as being externally-contributed may
also cause it to be scrutinised more deeply (by some reviewers anyway -
certainly not all) - not necessarily a bad thing most of the time
(depending on the experience of the contributor), but not quite the right
thing in principle.

 On 8 March 2016 at 18:44, Dan Garry <dgarry at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> That said, the reason we can prioritise reviewing these patches so highly
> is because I've worked on teams that typically get so few patches from
> external contributors. If I worked on a team that got more, then I imagine
> we'd have to make a much more practical decision of limiting the amount of
> time we spend reviewing such patches.
>
That would be bad. In my opinion, ideally we should look at moving towards
a system in which it doesn't matter whether you are external to the main
developers of a project or not, your patch would be reviewed based on it's
merits, the priority of issues it addresses, etc.

I'm also not a TPG member. :)
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