Re: who is on point for all of the various pull requests?

Hi John,

John Jansen <John.Jansen@microsoft.com>, 2015-08-18 15:47 +0000:
> Archived-At: <http://www.w3.org/mid/BLUSR01MB589947DFCD64CFACFBB66CDF1780@BLUSR01MB589.namsdf01.sdf.exchangelabs.com>
> 
> In looking through my own pull request, I noticed there are many many
> more pull requests awaiting approval - some dating back years.
> 
> Is there a policy in effect or anyone specifically on point to move these
> along? We have talked for years about how important it is to get the
> community submitting tests, but I imagine there is a sense of frustration
> felt for those who have submitted tests but have not had them approved or
> rejected.

Yes, clearly we want people who submit good tests to be rewarded for it and
encouraged to write more—and certainly, we don’t want anybody to go away
frustrated.

Along with what James noted about fast-tracking test submissions that have
already had some upstream review, the other cases where we’ve had the most
success with getting tests merged are often ones where the test submittors
have themselves also done some work to identify potential subject-matter
experts (e.g., implementors of the spec or spec editors or QA engineers for a
particular spec) who can be good reviewers of the actual content of the tests
(compared to the logistics of, say, just being able to verify that the test
follows best practices in how it uses the test harness and such)—and the
test submittor has recruited that subject-matter-expert as a reviewer.

It takes quite a large amount of work and time to get familiar enough with
a spec to be able to confidently volunteer to review tests that are
submitted for the spec. We are extremely lucky to have among our small set
of core reviewers some people who have the experience and breadth that’s
needed to review a fairly large range of spec content (and to be clear, I
don’t count myself as one of those people) but I think we are currently
leaning a bit too much on that small group, and expecting them to be able
to do more than they can, practically speaking.

So I think what we should be trying to do instead is to come up with an
additional workflow that helps us get in particular subject-matter-expert
when we need them, for particular test submissions. For those cases, we
have plenty of bandwidth between us to help get those new special-case
reviewers up to speed on any general/incidental details of the test
infrastructure/logistics they need to know.

  —Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith https://people.w3.org/mike