[QGIS-Developer] A plea: more volunteers needed for reviewing backports

[Régis Haubourg]

Hi all,

I quite agree with Martin here.  That's the only way to avoid the open
source maintainer fatigue syndrom .  As a community member, I think i t
would be fair to have less expenses on Grants and more on the
backgrounnd mandatory tasks like review, packaging and documentation.
And I want to stress out we also need to ensure that at least two
persons can run the tasks, because of this bus-factor thing for sure,
but also because we all deserve vacations sometimes (included looong
ones sometimes)

Best regards

Régis


On 01/05/2021 12:33, Martin Dobias wrote:
> Hi all
>
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 12:07 AM Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com
> <mailto:nyall.dawson at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     This is a public plea for more developers who are very familiar with
>     different parts of the QGIS codebase to become actively involved in
>     backport PR management.
>
>
> (Nyall later clarified this is not only about backport PRs, but all
> reviews in general)
>
> Thanks for starting this thread - it is a discussion we definitely
> need to have. (And apologies for getting back to this soooo late!)
>
> Pull request reviews are absolutely vital part of the QGIS
> development, a chance to get bugs fixed before they even get into QGIS
> code. Quality reviews also need a good amount of expertise of the QGIS
> code - often the hardest part of a review is not the code included is
> the pull request, but figuring out what is missing...
>
> Speaking of myself, I used to review pull requests regularly... But
> after several years I have to admit I mostly gave up doing that unless
> someone asks me to do a review. The pace of QGIS development is not
> getting any slower (which is great!), so there is a constant flow of
> new pull requests and doing code reviews regularly is not something I
> want to do in my free time... I am happy to do some QGIS work in my
> free time, but only doing what I want to do :-)
>
> For a company, strictly business speaking, sparing 15 minutes a day of
> a senior developer is roughly equivalent to lost profit of few
> thousands of EUR (assuming ~50 hours / year). And many reviews need
> much more time than 15 minutes... Moreover companies doing QGIS dev
> are often already donating to QGIS as sustaining members...
>
> In a mail in the thread it was suggested that companies doing QGIS
> development should add extra cost to quotes to accommodate the time
> for reviews (of unrelated pull requests). Not sure I agree with that -
> if a company had constant income from QGIS dev, that's doable, but if
> we are talking about occasional QGIS dev work, that is hard to plan.
>
> From all of that above, my thinking is that in order to make things
> sustainable, regular pull request reviews should be ideally funded by
> QGIS.org similarly to how paid bug-fixing sprints work. It is the kind
> of project maintainance work that needs to be done, it is not always
> super fun and it requires input of someone from a small group of
> people that are already donating lots of their free time.
>
> My proposal would be therefore along these lines:
> - PSC allocates annual budget to reviews
> - core devs interested in participating would indicate their
> availability (eligibility may be the same as with paid bug fixing)
> - PSC tells devs how much paid time they can spend on reviews
> - paid devs should do reviews regularly, e.g. at least twice a week,
> ideally every day - not just once a month or so
> - paid devs would self-assign themselves to PRs and do reviews
> - if a PR is not picked up by anyone e.g. within 3 days, PR queue
> manager would assign it to one of the paid devs
> - paid devs keep track of their time in a spreadsheet and invoice
> (quarterly?) up to the amount they were allocated
>
> I believe this approach should solve our problems:
> - remove stress from growing PR queue and reviewer burnout
> - get more core devs (who otherwise may not be available) to do reviews
> - reduce frustration from devs submitting PRs when their PRs are not
> getting attention
>
> In my humble opinion, good quality reviews are even more important
> than the regular paid bug fixing or grants. A review that is rushed
> due to lack of time may omit important code details, or focus only on
> code style...
>
> We could start with a relatively small budget and compensate the
> extremely valuable work that reviewers (Nyall and others) are already
> doing.
>
> Regards
> Martin
>
>
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