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

Michael, 
> >
> > 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.

I think you make a lot of sense. Now that I've read this email and James's, I think I understand how it works. We are leaning too heavily on the small group and definitely expecting more from them than is fair. It honestly wasn't clear to me that anyone can help with reviews, for some reason I was thinking you wanted to keep it confined to that small group.

> 
> 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.

Yes! I agree. I think that it would be great to identify and notify subject matter experts when submissions come in. I suppose that really is all we can do. I realize it is also the case that we need to prioritize our work based on what specs we think must move to REC now as opposed to being able to wait a bit.

Thanks for the thoughtful responses.

-John

Received on Wednesday, 19 August 2015 16:13:25 UTC