PR duty

Meta jared771 at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 21:42:50 UTC 2018


On Wednesday, 4 April 2018 at 05:31:10 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Hi folks, I was thinking of the following.
>
> To keep the PR queue trim and in good shape, we'd need at least 
> one full-time engineer minding it. I've done that occasionally, 
> and the queue size got shorter, but I couldn't do much else 
> during that time.
>
> I was thinking, we can't afford a full-time engineer, and even 
> if we did, we'd probably have other important matters for that 
> engineer as well. However, what we can afford - and indeed 
> already benefit from - is a quantum of time from each of many 
> volunteers. By organizing that time better we may be able to 
> get more output. Here's what I'm thinking.
>
> Let's define a "PR duty" role that is one week long for each of 
> a pool of volunteers. During that week, the person on PR duty 
> focuses on minding github queues - merge trivial PRs, ping 
> authors of old PRs, email decision makers for specific items in 
> PRs, etc. Then the week ends and the role is handed off to the 
> next person in the pool.
>
> A calendar maintained by an impartial person - maybe we can ask 
> Mike - would keep track of everything.
>
> The most obvious candidates for PR duty engineers would be the 
> most prolific contributors in the respective repositories.
>
> One question would be how many distinct pools/tracks we should 
> have. Presumably someone fluent with phobos is not necessarily 
> fluent with dmd. So probably we need at least two tracks:
>
> * dmd
> * everything else (druntime, phobos, tools, site)
>
> If there are a dozen of us in each pool, each would be on duty 
> one week every three months. Even with eight, we'd be on duty a 
> manageable week every other month.
>
> Please share your thoughts.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei

Something adjacent but related that I've been wanting to suggest 
for awhile is that we hold a semi-weekly or weekly scrum for 
Phobos and/or dmd (with possibly overlapping but not necessarily 
identical groups).

I'm thinking that you would attend the Phobos one and Walter the 
dmd one (I don't think it'd be necessary to have you at _every_ 
meeting). The idea is that we go over each PR opened that week 
and decide what to do with them (merge, close, needs guidance, 
needs W/A decision, etc.) The scrum master that sprint (which 
could rotate between people) is responsible for getting a 
decision from you or Walter on items (if you're not at the 
scrum), ensuring action items are followed up on by those they're 
assigned to, just generally coordination and administrative 
tasks...

The goal is to improve the team's velocity such that we are 
handling every PR that comes in for that week, and then start 
eating into the backlog. IMO that backlog should be prioritized, 
but I'm not certain how to go about that yet.

Anyway, end result is that hopefully we get the queue down and 
are for the most part just handling new PRs each week. A big 
component of this is you being available for, say, at least one 
meeting a month.

That being said, one big stumbling block I see is people being 
located in wildly different timezones, such as Sebastian in 
Germany, you on the east coast, Mike in Korea, etc.


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