New prow feature: Status Availability in Review Assignments

[Christoph Blecker]

tl;dr:

- New feature in how we assign PR reviews

- Your GitHub Status will soon influence if you are assigned incoming PRs

- Will have impact on who gets assigned reviews and when

- Please take two minutes and review this e-mail

- Looking to turn this on next week (5/15)

Hey kubernetes-dev,

I sent this out to ContribEx already, but now I wanted to open it up to a larger audience for feedback. I'm proposing that next week we enable a new feature I added to prow's blunderbuss plugin: Status Availability! 🎉

The way it works:

In January, GitHub introduced a feature where you can set a user status on your GitHub profile: https://github.blog/changelog/2019-01-09-set-your-status/. When you set a status, there is a little checkbox for "Busy". When you check this box, it adds some special UI elements in GitHub's UI when someone mentions or assigns you to things, advising them that you have limited availability. 🚫

We just merged a feature into prow's blunderbuss plugin (handles requesting reviews from folks in `reviewers:` lines in OWNERS files when new PRs are opened), that allows it to take into account when a reviewer is unavailable.

If a reviewer has a status set, and they've specifically marked themselves as "Busy", blunderbuss will not assign them new PRs for review. Note, this is only in blunderbuss right now, not the approve plugin, so they may still be suggested as an approver on a PR.. but they won't be assigned that initial review by the bot. 🤖

The thought is that this will promote a healthier contributor experience in two ways:

- It allows reviewers to be able to take guilt-free breaks from having reviews assigned to them. Whether it's a vacation, illness, crunch time at $dayjob, or something else, we all have need for a break and it can be really tough when the never-sleeping bot is assigning you more work. Burnout prevention 👌

- Contributors who open a PR may not know the availability of the folks the bot assigns. If they don't, it's possible that their PR will get reviews requested by someone who is on leave for some reason. This leads to longer review times, and a detrimental experience. 🕔

There's one important caveat though: We need to encourage folks to be fair with how they use this. If they have a yellow busy status, they're not participating in the review pool, but will still be listed in OWNERS files. If someone can't do reviews for a long period of time, it's better to remove yourself from OWNERS so that we have visibility and potentially nominate someone else. Ultimately, if someone is inactive, we'd rather them be out of the review pool rather than PR authors having their work assigned to a dead end.. but we just need folks to pay a little more attention to this status because it's actually going to mean something. 🙇‍

I'd like to propose that we enable this on Wednesday, May 15, 2019.

Feedback, questions, concerns? Please reply to this and let me know, or catch me in #sig-contribex on Slack.

Thank you!

Christoph

Bot Herder and Burnout Battler

[Christoph Blecker]

Reminder: This is will be turned on tomorrow. Please ensure your GitHub status availability correctly reflects your availability :)

[Christoph Blecker]

This is now live :)