Code review management
| Group: | Platform |
| Team: | Tim Starling, Chad Horohoe, Sam Reed, Aaron Schulz |
| Management: | Rob Lanphier |
| Status: | See updates |
Code review is the systematic examination of MediaWiki core and extension code revisions intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in development.
This page is about Wikimedia-sponsored code review, focusing on MediaWiki core and extensions used on Wikimedia production wikis.
Contents |
Status [edit]
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[edit status] • [add new]2012-09-monthly:Volunteers have been of a lot of help in managing the wiki configuration (operations/mediawiki-config) repository. The WMF analytics code review graphs show an uptick in patchsets awaiting review at the end of September, and a Signpost analysis showed (among other statistics) that WMF staff provide 86% of first reviews for core patchsets, and just five staffers collectively account for about 55% of that total.
Rationale [edit]
We have a large community of developers who are frustrated with the current velocity of our code reviews. On the flip side, we need to review changes made to the site carefully enough such that our operations team doesn't have to continuously recover from poor developer choices.
Timeline [edit]
In the long term, we are brainstorming now how to best identify and train community members to take up some of the code review tasks and how to provide appropriate oversight to ensure that we continue to catch potential style, architecture, performance, and security flaws in submitted code.
Other than "just get cracking" (which we're doing), one other thing is to try to improve visibility into the problem. Rob Lanphier plans to start reporting on our current metrics based on some work that Bryan Tong Minh has already started. See code review status graph (dead link as of July 2012) to see the number of "ok" commits plotted against the number of total commits in the "phase3" branch.
