I started reading through my request queue today. These are requests for review I've made from others. It's pretty depressing reading, as usual. About half of the requests are on behalf of someone else, not even for my patches. Fully half of the patches date to June 2005 or earlier. Most of these have no indication from the reviewer that they ever plan to look at the patch. And this is given that I go through this list every so often and harrass people with non-bugmail... Maybe we should just start publically naming names. A "review hall of shame" if you will, posted on Mozillazine every week. Note that I fully expect I would be in any such list, since I have at least 4 or 5 review requests from before September 2005... So I understand how this sort of thing happens. But at least I try to make an effort to tell people in the bug if review will take a while...
Posted by bzbarsky at October 21, 2005 10:03 AMIndeed, a shame, not only about not giving an indication about postponing the review, but more importantly because a lot of important and good patches improving on many aspects of the Mozilla applications are postponed, and slip past milestones/releases again and again.
What can we do to make it more interesting for reviewers to complete the reviews sooner?
Posted by: Alfred Kayser on October 21, 2005 10:26 AMSo what is a reasonable time period for getting a review? (what is a reasonable time period to get at least a reaction that the review is coming later?)
Posted by: Martijn on October 21, 2005 11:42 AMI try to at least put _something_ in the bug by at most a week after the review was requested, even if it's just a "don't expect review from me for three weeks" kinda thing. That at least lets the requester know that they might want to find another reviewer...
Alfred, I'm not really sure what we can do about the problem.... :(
Posted by: Boris on October 21, 2005 12:43 PMIt is a shame indeed. I have no problem with reviews taking a long time; everyone is busy. It would be nice if everyone followed your lead though Boris, and at least state that they have seen the request and will get to it in x amount of time. Or to say "I can't review this."
Perhaps integrate an "Acknowledge Request" function in Bugzilla?
IMHO the number one thing we can do in general (maybe not for bz's list) is to add bugzilla support for each user to specify whether or not he/she is accepting review requests. There's a years-old RFE bug on this...
Posted by: Robert O'Callahan on October 21, 2005 4:42 PMI think the whole review request system itself may be broken.
Wouldn’t it be better if review requests were not asked of a single person, but instead be put in a common (categorised, by component) queue which any available reviewer takes items from?
Setting a review request would then also be a lot easier, just set a flag ‘I want review’ instead of first having to figure out a. who knows enough about the matter to be able to review, and b. who has time, is still actively working, etc.
That way, if someone doesn’t have time for reviewing, someone else can pick up without the review requesters having to reassign the review request.
~Grauw
With that suggestion you have the opposite problem -- reviewers have to figure out which patches they might possibly be qualified to review...
Posted by: Boris on October 23, 2005 8:47 AM... and you may have the problem that nobody feels responsible for doing certain reviews.
Posted by: Simon Paquet on October 23, 2005 4:14 PMHow about if a patch which has had requested review for one month (or whatever) automatically gets (one or more of):
- an entry added in Bugzilla, stating that it's been waiting for too long, and that they should seek a review from someone else (possibly with suggestions for other people who can review that area?)
- an email to the reporter/patch provider/both instead
- an email to the reviewer telling them they're late :)
- an email to all the reviewers who can do that section, asking if one of them could take it up (possibly automatically done after say another month instead).
Posted by: Ian on October 24, 2005 3:20 AMIan, some of those are pretty good ideas. Want to file some RFEs on bugzilla?
Posted by: Boris on October 24, 2005 7:33 AMWhat are the bug numbers related to Ian's post?
Posted by: Wayne Mery on November 7, 2005 9:57 AM