Can some projects configure auto addition of reviewers to changes?

[Antoine Musso]

Le 05/03/2021 à 10:16, Sorin Sbarnea a écrit :
> <snip>
> I also seen that Wikimedia experimented something 
> <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/live/1/post/139/gerrit_now_automatically_adds_reviewers/> 
> in that area, apparently there is a wiki page where people can mark 
> them as available to be picked.

Hello,

I wrote that Wikimedia blog post! Let me side track a bit to give a bit 
more information.

The context is Wikimedia has been struggling with code review for as 
long as we had more than a handful of people.  Code review is always a 
hot topic and is causing pain all across the community with various 
degrees of experience.  Some repositories are carefully watched by their 
maintainers, others have mostly inner team reviews and it might be hard 
to get a review if you are an outsider.

*git blame*

An idea we had was to automatically add code reviewer based on `git 
blame` (which I often relies on). That is how we have added the 
reviewers by blame plugin. Cause I was super ambitious I went with the 
default setting and it got enabled on every single repositories.  The 
day after, people complained about being added to reviewers to a random 
set of patches that touched code that they once touched, most often 
unrelated to their review capabilities.  The huge spam of emails caused 
us to roll back that deployment and forget about automatically adding 
reviewers based on blame. It just don't fit within our ecosystem.

I have updated the blog post to highlight we have disabled the reviewer 
by blame plugin almost immediately.

*homemade tooling*

The primary system we use is Reviewer bot. People register their 
interest on a wiki page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Reviewers 
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Reviewers> for example I can get 
added for any changes made to a `tox.ini` file on any repo or to any 
changes made to `ci/*` gerrit repositories.  I can't remember the 
details of the implementation, I think all changes are send to a mailing 
list, the bot fetches the email, processes them, fetch the wiki page and 
apply the rules.

The equivalent as a Gerrit plugin would be the reviewers plugin:

https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/reviewers/+/refs/heads/master/src/main/resources/Documentation/config.md 
<https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/reviewers/+/refs/heads/master/src/main/resources/Documentation/config.md>

We have it installed but I don't think it is used. Last time I checked 
there is no UI for it and people have to add themselves via a 
reviewers.config file under refs/meta/config. Needless to say you loose 
99% of the audience at that point. Editing a wiki page is way simpler 
for us.

*attention set*

Google is well aware of the issue related to find reviewers, or at least 
highlighting when a change should be acted on among the list of changes 
one is a reviewer for. Gerrit 3.3 introduces a featured named attention 
set which is a bit of a turn based, when one does an action they can 
bring up to the attention of some of the reviewers while others are not.

So if Jane asks me to rewrite a test, she will bring my attention, I 
will amend my code send a patch and bring attention back to her.  After 
a while once we both agree the change is now fine, we will bring it to 
the attention of the others. I really like that turn based review among 
a subset of the reviewers, that should cut a bit of spam or at least 
make the dashboard slightly more helpful.

The feature is better described at 
https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/user-attention-set.html 
<https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/user-attention-set.html> 
I have been exposed to it while contributing to Gerrit upstream and it 
is really an enjoyable system.


And all the above do not address the root causes:

* finding who can review code

* burden put on the shoulder of the few that can actually review, 
leading to a huge backlog which is most probably ignored as a result

It is a social problem really :-\

-- 

Antoine "hashar" Musso

Wikimedia Release Engineering


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opendev.org/pipermail/service-discuss/attachments/20210305/b7da84aa/attachment.html>