[Development] Session notes for "Code Review: Sharing the load" and follow-up session

[Nils Jeisecke]

Hi list,

these are my notes for "Code Review: Sharing the load" session, extended
by "Improve the contributor experience of the Qt project"

---

* Situation: Many reviews in queue for long time (forever?)
  * Android: They have a button: Find "Maintainers" (Plugin for Gerrit)
  * Thiago: Would solve the first 15 Minutes for Contributors, not enough
  * Improve the culture, appreciate the effort ("Thank you!")
  * Get more people on-board as reviewers (not as approvers yet)
  * Idea: Should not be +1 and +1, should be "Thumbs up" and "Tick!"
    * Some reviewers don't understand the implication of "+1" (two "+1" != "+2")

* What does a good patch looks like?
 * breaking patch up into multiple patches
 * Is the documentation really good enough (opinions vary)

* Ask contributors whose changes have just been review to review others (sometimes happens)

* Gerrit
  * Sanity bot is good
  * Revive early warning bot!
    * Should changes only be approved after tests has run on CI?
    * Can we get a "small CI" run (just Linux, "does it build?")
    * Should the bot automatically run tests if tests have been changed?
    * Should the bot automatically give a warning if tests have not been added (excluding doc only changes)?
  * "Auto defer" bot is currently not active, would be useful to automatically
    defer patches where contributor did not response to requests.
  * Automatically stage when change is approved? Faster turnaround time.
  * Mail (monthly?) reports to maintainers (or others?) (based on gerrit dashboard config?): "N Changes approved, but not staged? Link to staging page", List per module? 
  * Let's try it and see how it works out

* Gerrit Features unused right now
  * Attach labels
  * Bot could apply hashtags ("wants adoption", "stage-me")
  * Has a feature to make clazy automatically appply improvements to the change ("contributor has to click a button")
  
* Public Community Feedback does not exist
  * Alex: Use Thiago's script to highlight new contributions (Grafana?)? "Welcome new contributor!" for blog post (Like KDE does)?

---

Follow-up session extensions (lots of overlapping topics)

* Give contributor feedback
  * Bot should say: "Welcome, Thanks for your first contribution"
  * Monthly blog post advertising external contributors?
  * Send out physical awards? T-Shirts, "Thank you" letter, ...?

* Make contributing easier
  * Put contributor documentation into Qt's documentation ("Gettings started")?
  * Link freenode IRC Web-Backend to simplify access to IRC for new contributors
  * Use Qt account profile to setup everything needed for contributing (ssh keys, CLA check, ...)
  * Adapt github workflow (Checklist "Auto test done", "Documentation done", ...)

* Triage bugs
  * Add Jira label ("for juniors")?

* Community
  * Missing Community manager (Consent: Yes, it's needed)
  * Missing "qt-project" entity, kind of a foundation? Funding?
  * Redefine: What is the qt-project?

* Activating new contributors
  * Communication of Qt (company) targets companies, not community (qt.org => qt.io => sales)
  * Microsoft pushes its stuff to universities, why not Qt (or qt-project?)
  * Qt project needs a proper homepage. With nice, contemporary Howtos, ...

---

Nils
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