Trevor Parscal wrote:
On Mar 28, 2011, at 1:31 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
You say that as though this were obvious and uncontroversial. The reason why we've been dancing around this issue is because it is not.
Right now, we have a system whereby junior developers get to commit whatever they want, whenever they want. Under the system you outline, the only remedy we have to the problem of falling behind is to throw more senior developer time at the problem, no matter how ill-advised or low-priority the changes the junior developers are making. Taken to an extreme, this means that junior developers maintain complete control over the direction of MediaWiki, with the senior developers there purely in a subservient role of approving/rejecting code as it comes in.
What comes of this system should be obvious: senior developer burnout. If only reward we offer for becoming an experienced developer is less interesting work with less power over day-to-day work, we're not going to attract and retain people in senior positions.
To be clear, none of the developers in WMF's General Engineering group have been pulled off of code review. However, not all of the WMF's senior staff are part of GenEng.
Rob
I must whole-heartedly agree with RobLa here. For quite some time we had 2 reviewers, then just 1. Naturally unreviewed revisions started to pile up, so we assigned more of our developers to perform code review. This got us out from under a ridiculous backlog and get 1.17 out into the wild, but in the process very little else got done.
It's important that we all work together on features, not just the junior people only to get a "pass" or "fail" from the senior people.
- Trevor
That means that there aren't enough developers so that review could be handled without doing it full-time. Which is a big problem (senior developer burnout, need for a code freeze, senior devs not available for doing Real Code...).
Which lead us to the old issue of how to clone senior developers ;)