On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 3:10 PM Andrew Lamb <al...@influxdata.com> wrote: > > The thing that would make me more efficient reviewing PRs is figuring out > which one of the open reviews are ready for additional feedback.
Yes, I think this would be the single most significant quality-of-life improvement for reviewers. > I think the idea of a webapp or something that shows active reviews would > be helpful (though I get most of that from appropriate email filters). > > What about a system involving labels (for which there is already a basic > GUI in github)? Something low tech like > > (Waiting for Review) > (Addressing Feedback) > (Approved, waiting for Merge) > > With maybe some automation prompting people to add the "Waiting on Review" > label when they want feedback I think it would have to be a bot that automatically sets the labels. If it requires contributors to take some action outside of pushing new work (new commits or a rebased version of the patch) to the PR and leaving responses to comments on the PR, the system is likely to fail some non-trivial percentage of the time. Given the quality of off-the-shelf web app components nowadays (e.g. https://material-ui.com), throwing together a read-only PR dashboard that shows what has changed since you last interacted with them (along with some other helpful things, like whether the build is passing) is "probably" not a super heavy lift. I haven't done any frontend development in years so while the backend part (writing Python code to wrangle data from GitHub's REST API and put it in a SQLite database) wouldn't take very long I would need some help on the front end portion and setting it up for deployment on DigitalOcean or somewhere. > Andrew > > On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 4:28 AM Wes McKinney <wesmck...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > hi folks, > > > > I've noted that the volume of PRs for Arrow has been steadily > > increasing (and will likely continue to increase), and while I've > > personally had less time for development / maintenance / code reviews > > over the last year, I would like to have a discussion about what we > > could do to improve our tooling for maintainers to optimize the > > efficiency of time spent tending to the PR queue. In my own > > experience, I have felt that I have wasted a lot of time digging > > around the queue looking for PRs that are awaiting feedback or need to > > be merged. > > > > I note first of all that around 70 out of 173 open PRs have been > > updated in the last 7 days, so while there is some PR staleness, to > > have nearly half of the PRs active is pretty good. That said, ~70 > > active PRs is a lot of PRs to tend to. > > > > I scraped the project's code review comment history, and here are the > > individuals who have left the most comments on PRs since genesis > > > > pitrou 6802 > > wesm 5023 > > emkornfield 3032 > > bkietz 2834 > > kou 1489 > > nealrichardson 1439 > > fsaintjacques 1356 > > kszucs 1250 > > alamb 1133 > > jorisvandenbossche 1094 > > liyafan82 831 > > lidavidm 816 > > westonpace 794 > > xhochy 770 > > nevi-me 643 > > BryanCutler 639 > > jorgecarleitao 635 > > cpcloud 551 > > sunchao 536 > > ianmcook 499 > > > > Since we're probably stuck using GitHub to receive code contributions > > (as opposed to systems — Gerrit is one I'm familiar with — that > > provide more structure for reviewers to track the patches they "own" > > as well as the outgoing/incoming state of reviews), I am wondering > > what kinds of tools we could create to make it easier for maintainers > > to keep track of PRs they are shepherding through the contribution > > process. Ideally this wouldn't involve maintainers having to engage in > > some explicit action like assigning themselves as a PR reviewer. > > > > Here's one idea: a web application that displays "your reviews", a > > table of PRs that you have interacted with in any way (commented, left > > code review, assigned as reviewer, someone mentioned you, etc.) sorted > > either by last commit or last comment to assess "freshness". So if you > > comment on a PR or leave a code review, it will automatically show up > > in "your reviews". It could also indicate whether there has been > > activity on the PR since the last time you interacted with it. > > > > Having now used the GitHub API to pull comments from PRs for the above > > analysis, there is certainly enough information available to help > > create this kind of tool. I'd be willing to contribute to building the > > backend of such a web application. > > > > This is just one idea, but I am curious to hear from others who are > > spending a lot of time doing code review / PR merging to see what > > might help them use their time more effectively. > > > > Thanks, > > Wes > >
