How to motivate developers to act on open gerrits?

[William]

Often, we are running into a scenario in our team where our CI system builds and tests the open changes but the Code-review and Verified labels are pending ,they are stuck waiting on CR+2 and V+1 for weeks and the open changes become stale, we started sending daily emails to get attention for such changes but developers are too busy to take prompt action.

We are looking for a way to MOTIVATE (aka penalize :-) )developers to take action, am looking for ideas /suggestions on this can be done this gerrit? has anyone else run into similar workflow related problem and solved it by having a penalizing system?

[Jonathan Nieder]

Hi!

> Often, we are running into a scenario in our team where our CI system builds and tests the open changes but the Code-review and Verified labels are pending

This depends a lot on the relationship between the change authors and the reviewers. Do they work closely together and have the same goals in mind, or are they from separate teams? Are they good at dealing with disagreement, or do they have good reasons to fear getting involved in a review based on the painful interactions that might result?

If you are just meaning to reward behavior that you want to encourage, you can use search to count how many changes a person has reviewed, pick out a few to determine whether they are working well together and providing useful comments, and so on. But ultimately I think the motivation to review has to come from wanting to work together on improving the project's code base.

Separate from that is how to remind someone about a change they have started reviewing that now needs their attention. You might be interested in the upcoming attention set <https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/attention-set.html> features that help with that.

Thanks and hope that helps,

Jonathan

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 4:52 PM William <bacha....@gmail.com> wrote:

Often, we are running into a scenario in our team where our CI system builds and tests the open changes but the Code-review and Verified labels are pending ,they are stuck waiting on CR+2 and V+1 for weeks and the open changes become stale, we started sending daily emails to get attention for such changes but developers are too busy to take prompt action.

We are looking for a way to MOTIVATE (aka penalize :-) )developers to take action, am looking for ideas /suggestions on this can be done this gerrit? has anyone else run into similar workflow related problem and solved it by having a penalizing system?

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[William]

Hi Jonathan

When is  below feature scheduled?I looked at below feature,too detail oriented,do you mind sharing your view on how the below feature will help for this use-case?

upcoming attention set <https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/attention-set.html> features that help with that.

On Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 5:09:14 PM UTC-7, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

Hi!

> Often, we are running into a scenario in our team where our CI system builds and tests the open changes but the Code-review and Verified labels are pending

This depends a lot on the relationship between the change authors and the reviewers. Do they work closely together and have the same goals in mind, or are they from separate teams? Are they good at dealing with disagreement, or do they have good reasons to fear getting involved in a review based on the painful interactions that might result?

If you are just meaning to reward behavior that you want to encourage, you can use search to count how many changes a person has reviewed, pick out a few to determine whether they are working well together and providing useful comments, and so on. But ultimately I think the motivation to review has to come from wanting to work together on improving the project's code base.

Separate from that is how to remind someone about a change they have started reviewing that now needs their attention. You might be interested in the upcoming attention set <https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/attention-set.html> features that help with that.

Thanks and hope that helps,

Jonathan

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 4:52 PM William <bacha....@gmail.com> wrote:

Often, we are running into a scenario in our team where our CI system builds and tests the open changes but the Code-review and Verified labels are pending ,they are stuck waiting on CR+2 and V+1 for weeks and the open changes become stale, we started sending daily emails to get attention for such changes but developers are too busy to take prompt action.

We are looking for a way to MOTIVATE (aka penalize :-) )developers to take action, am looking for ideas /suggestions on this can be done this gerrit? has anyone else run into similar workflow related problem and solved it by having a penalizing system?

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[Jonathan Nieder]

Hi,

William wrote:

Hi Jonathan

When is  below feature scheduled?

https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/attention-set-conclusion.html#-implementation-plan says some time in the next few months. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if work is a bit slower during this period --- COVID-19 has not been kind to everyone. 

 

I looked at below feature,too detail oriented,do you mind sharing your view on how the below feature will help for this use-case?

https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/attention-set-use-cases.html describes what it's meant to do: in each developer's dashboard, there would be a section pointing out which changes require their attention (for example because they gave comments previously and the change author has finished addressing them and wants another look).

Thanks,

Jonathan

[Raviraj Karasulli]

How about abandon the changes after a certain amount of time if no activity?

Adding the below in your gerrit config will abandon the changes after 90 days of inactivity.

And it runs every week.

[changeCleanup]

    abandonAfter = 90 days

    startTime = Sun 21:00

    interval = 1 week

[Sven Selberg]

On Thursday, April 23, 2020 at 8:07:51 AM UTC+2, Raviraj Karasulli wrote:

How about abandon the changes after a certain amount of time if no activity?

Adding the below in your gerrit config will abandon the changes after 90 days of inactivity.

And it runs every week.

[changeCleanup]

    abandonAfter = 90 days

    startTime = Sun 21:00

    interval = 1 week

If you don't review a change because you feel you don't have the time or (worse) it's not your job it's probably a relief that it get's abandoned.

Unfortunately this is not a problem that is easily solved with any tool. If you have very low review participation currently, I don't think any feature will help you.

First and foremost it's about educating the developers that review is part of their job.

For us when reviews get's stuck it's almost always a case of someone-else-ism, meaning "I don't have to review this since there are other's added as reviewers".

What has helped our organization is the Assignee feature, that enables you to assign a review to a single reviewer. Unfortunately it looks like this feature stands the risk of being removed in the future.