Code review management

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.

Rationale
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
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.

Additional documents

 * Open merge requests for MediaWiki and its extensions
 * Code of the code review status graph
 * Status updates