The most recent developer satisfaction survey supports the claim that
volunteers find it hard to get code reviews. The hypothesis is that by
having clearer ownership around code, there should be clearer
accountability, and it should be clearer what code lacks ownership
that probably should.
This also applies to Wikimedia staff. It's often not clear when needing to make changes to core, who is the best person to talk to about that code, and who should be responsible/accountable/consulted/informed about any changes to the code.
I am involved in the development of the Desktop improvements project [1] and when we began the work there was no recognized owner for a lot of the skin code in core. Since then my team has taken the role of maintainer and it has allowed us to drive a lot of changes. I'm seeing new skins pop up and we have started hearing from skin engineers, so I feel this has been a positive thing. However, as we've navigated other parts of the codebase, we've had to ask a lot of questions such as "Who maintains the legacy parser? Are they open to changes there, or should that code be considered frozen?"; "Who should we talk to about changes relating to the JavaScript of the watchstar?"
What with the proposed move to Gitlab, I have been very interested in the code owners file documented on their site [2]
I hypothesize that identifying code owners and getting Wikimedia engineering to agree to some basic expectations around code ownership might go a long way to helping set expectations around who to talk to about making changes, and actually getting those changes carried to completion.
The experiment of adding an OWNERS file to MediaWiki core seems like a cheap one, given if we find it does nothing the file can easily be removed.
Wishing everyone a happy holiday
Jon