Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
In relation to our discussion about code review
metrics at
http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/gerrit_review_queue.html
I just learned that OpenStack has a policy to abandon
automatically reviews
sitting in -1 during more than one week:
Maybe one week is too tight for the reality of our
project, but what about
2-4 weeks?
Brad and others said last week that they were not
interested in code review
queue metrics mixing pending -1 reviews. Maybe the solution is not to tweak
the metrics, but to effectively abandon those changesets automatically?
No. First of all, this would give anyone who has -1 and can
click some buttons the power to abandon changes or at least
whip a contributor into action: "Fix this /now/, or else!"
I don't think this would be a healthy atmosphere for devel-
opment. From my limited view of development at OpenStack,
it appears that doesn't force contributors to produce +2able
changes in a jiffy, but just give up.
Second, changes with -1 appear in the Gerrit UI by default,
while abandoned changes do not. So all the work that was
done is effectively lost when finally someone new comes
along and wants to tackle a problem that has been approached
before.
Third, this sends out the message: "We welcome you as a con-
tributor! A patch, how awesome! Oh, sitting more than four
weeks? Then go away and only come back when your code is
ready because you are messing up our statistics!"
I'm all for abandoning changes when the author doesn't react
and the patch doesn't apply anymore (not in a technical
sense, but the patch's concept cannot be rebased to the cur-
rent HEAD). But forcing work on many just so that a metric
can be easier calculated by one is putting the burden on the
wrong side.
Tim