Having just come off sheriffing four days in the past two weeks ...
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Peter Kasting <pkast...@google.com> wrote:
> At lunch today, a few of us discussed the idea of moving from two sheriffs
> to four.
> There are several reasons we contemplated such a change:
> * The team is large enough that on the current schedule, you go months
> between sheriffing, which is so long that you forget things like what tools
> help you do what.
This is perhaps true, but I think it's more an issue that people don't
run more of the tests on their own machines (or, alternatively, are
asked to sheriff for areas of the system they never touch).
> * Sheriffing is a heavy burden, and getting moreso with more team members.
> * Either the two sheriffs are in different time zones, in which case you
> have effectively one sheriff on duty who has to do everything (bad due to
> point above), or they're not, in which case a chunk of the day is not
> covered at all.
I think two sheriffs in US/Pacific during US/Pacific work hours is
plenty. I can't speak to how much an issue the lack of sheriffs are to
people outside that window.
> * New sheriffs could really use a "mentor sheriff" with them, which is
> pretty difficult to schedule.
Last week was actually my first time, and I didn't think it was a big
deal, although I did ask a few people a few questions.
I was pretty much full time on keeping the tree green and cleaning up
flaky tests. Given that I'm otherwise full time on LTTF, this wasn't
much of a change. I think it's unrealistic to expect to do anything
real on a project while sheriffing, because you can't context-switch
that fast to do a good job on either (at least, I can't).
I also think the bots would've been green most of the time except that
someone has clearly been ignoring the memory tests for a long time. If
bots fails for a couple days straight, it's beyond a sheriff to try
and fix it - I think someone needs to get assigned that problem
specifically.
So, I'd probably leave things mostly the way they are unless there's a
desire to have better sheriffing outside of the MTV hours. I fully
support always having two sheriffs during MTV hours.
-- Dirk
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