Proposal to greatly increase the number of DB Reviewers
At this point in time we have zero database reviewers. This is putting a much higher burden for reviewing database code reviews on the trainee maintainers. To put this in perspective, here are the current counts for reviewers, traintainers and maintainers
Category | Reviewers | Traintainers | Maintainers |
---|---|---|---|
Backend | 66 | 39 | 27 |
Frontend | 31 | 24 | 14 |
Database | 0 | 6 | 5 |
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/projects/
Proposal
Engineering managers work with your team to look for volunteers or nominate someone from each backend engineering team to immediately sign up as a database reviewer
- If nominating, select the person most comfortable with the role
- Ask them to join the database office hours held bi-weekly to help bolster their confidence in database reviews
- Suggestion: follow the domain expertise guidelines and focus database review requests within the teams
- Don't be afraid to ask for help
- Update team.yml to indicate that they are a reviewer
Why
To better spread the database knowledge across all backend engineering teams and to lighten the load on database maintainers and traintainers.
The initial review of any MR falls on reviewers and traintainers. Traintainers have triple the chance to be picked as a reviewer (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/master/danger/roulette/Dangerfile#L61). If my math is correct last month looked like this:
Category | MRs | Per Reviewer (avg/mo) | Per Traintainer (avg/mo) |
---|---|---|---|
Backend | 776 | 4.24 | 12.72 |
Frontend | 646 | 6.27 | 18.81 |
Database | 186 | 0 | 31 |
Math to find per reviewer = # MRs / (Reviewers + (Traintainers *3)) Chance of being selected to review 1 in # of reviewers + # traintainers * 3