GitHub Pull Requests and Issues Update

[James Bayer]

Quick summary:

• we started an experiment to have several rotating engineers dedicated to pull requests and issues 3 weeks ago
  
• great news is that we have processed over 200 PRs and about 134 issues in about 3 weeks
  
• we've learned a bit about how to improve our handling of PRs and Issues too and we'd like your feedback on our updated policy
  

More detail:

Here is a view for the most recently closed pull requests ordered by most recent:

https://github.com/organizations/cloudfoundry/dashboard/pulls/public?direction=desc&page=1&sort=updated&state=closed A shorthand URL that will get you close and then you have to tweak the filters is http://bit.ly/cfpulls

So that's about 64 closed pull requests in the last week. Some of those are me contributing to docs out of my personal repo, so it's a bit inflated, but not too much. Over 200 pull requests processed (merged or closed, etc) since we began trying dedicated engineers 3 weeks ago.

You can use this view for Issues:

https://github.com/organizations/cloudfoundry/dashboard/issues/repos?direction=desc&state=closed

About 60 issues processed in the last week. Before having dedicated people, issues had the potential to go a long time without activity. About 134 issues have been processed since the dedicated team experiment started 3 weeks ago.

Some of the issues were closed before the core issue was addressed because at the time we were working under a policy that if the core team could not work on it soon, that we would close the issue. We've decided to revisit that policy based on feedback. Here is an updated Pull Request and Issue policy that I would love to get your feedback on. You should be able to add comments to this doc. Let us know if you prefer long-form or bullets too.

https://docs.google.com/a/gopivotal.com/document/d/16OPPJ1WIndxgKI6CY1daPZjYbVHQym_kA6aXzBrJiJs/edit#

Thanks for making the Cloud Foundry community so great and we look forward to your feedback!

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Thank you,

James Bayer

[Mike Youngstrom]

These look like great policies to me assuming the feedback I get or PRs and issues is timely.  I will totally take a "need more tests" or "provide a reproducible test case" as valid responses to a PR.  Its lack of feedback that is hard for me to handle as a contributor. :)  The feedback and attention to issues and PRs the last could of weeks has been great.

I prefer the bullet form.

If I had an issue closed that should have been left as "open for contribution" should I go ahead and re-open the issue?  Or are these policies just candidates at this point?

Mike

[James Bayer]

Mike, please go ahead and re-open them or open new issues for ones you think would meet the "open for contribution" bucket. Sorry you have to do that but these adjustments are intended to respond to the feedback we've received and hopefully an improvement.

[Chris Ferris]

James,

Awesome! This is really making a difference. Thanks for the update.

Chris

Sent from my iPhone

[Dr Nic Williams]

It's been great to have an active pair reviewing all tickets; immediate feedback on work is important. And conversely, it can be hard to be motivated to act on feedback for a PR that's 3 months old :) So this has been great recently.

It's also encouraged me to create some new PRs.

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Dr Nic Williams
Stark & Wayne LLC - the consultancy for Cloud Foundry
http://starkandwayne.com
+1 415 860 2185
twitter: drnic