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

[Alessandro Pasotti]

Thank you Martin,

I agree with your proposal, this is in line with what we have already
discussed and it sounds a sustainable way to solve the problem, I'm not
sure about the budget though: Andreas will probably have more information
on that.



On Sat, May 1, 2021 at 12:33 PM Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all
>
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 12:07 AM Nyall Dawson <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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-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
QCooperative:  www.qcooperative.net
ItOpen:   www.itopen.it
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