On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:58 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
Alright, we've had fun with all caps for a while, so let's focus on solutions now.
Ok, I'm turning in my caps lock key. ;)
So let me sketch how I see us getting there.
- Get 1.18 reviewed
2a. Get 1.18 deployed and released 2b. At the same time, continue efforts to have code review catch up with SVN HEAD 3. Once we have reviewed everything up to HEAD (or up to a revision less than a week older than HEAD), deploy it to Wikimedia 4. Keep reviewing so the CR backlog doesn't grow, and deploy HEAD again in 1-2 weeks. Rinse and repeat.
There are a few caveats here, of course:
- 2a and 2b largely compete for the time of the same developers
That's one of the reasons actually assigning time for it should be helpful: currently we have zero staff dedicated full-time to getting code ready for deployment and deployed. We have several staff & contractors with it on their list of duties, but no actual requirement that it get done on a regular basis. With no regular short-term review & deployment schedule (even for fixes), we all find other things to do and get out of the habit.
And let's not forget that a big part of what review does is to help develop the reviewee's coding skills! By pointing out things that need fixing and things to watch out for, we help all our coders become better coders. And by pushing review closer to the original code-writing, we'll make that feedback loop tighter & more effective.
- 3 (initial HEAD deployment) will probably be a bit hairy because
it's a lot of code the first time. After that it's only 1-2 weeks' worth each time
- For 4, we need to figure out a way to make CR actually happen in a
regular and timely fashion
+1
So a lot of it comes down to implementing a proper code review process, both for the one-off catch-up sprint (to 1.18, then to HEAD; we've done one of these before with 1.17) and for the day-to-day keep-up work. I think we may also need to make it clearer that reviewers (who, typically, are paid developers working on many other things) need to spend one-fifth of their time (i.e. a day per week for full-time employees) on code review. This is basically the "admins aren't watching Special:Unreviewedpages at all" problem that Happy-melon mentioned.
*nod*
-- brion