Distributing MR reviews for community contributions across stages
Problem
MR reviews for community contributions often add quite some work to a designers plate. Most of that is unplanned, as community members do not follow our Product Development flow and these requests could come in at any point during the milestone.
When investigating how that work is distributed across the different stages, it stood out that the vast majority of MR reviews for community contributions go to the 4 most used stages (Create also includes Foundations, as that is part of Ecosystem).
| Team | All time | Last 3 months | With UX | Last 3 months with UX |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Create | 679 | 125 | 68 | 36 |
| Configure | 55 | 9 | 0 | 0 |
| Enablement | 127 | 8 | 2 | 1 |
| Fulfillment | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| Growth | 17 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| Manage | 383 | 57 | 36 | 13 |
| Monitor | 151 | 8 | 6 | 3 |
| Package | 176 | 40 | 5 | 0 |
| Plan | 532 | 84 | 28 | 10 |
| Protect | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Release | 112 | 17 | 9 | 2 |
| Secure | 85 | 14 | 4 | 1 |
| Verify | 439 | 65 | 26 | 6 |
We also have a considerable uptick in community contributions over the last milestones.
| 13.9 | 13.8 | 13.7 | 13.6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 240 | 151 | 168 | 121 |
We noticed that this amount of MR reviews has a direct impact on the designers in these stages, @uhlexsis did a great job mentioning this as part of her trouble with design reviews in our last UX retrospective https://gitlab.com/gl-retrospectives/ux-retrospectives/-/issues/32#note_516469009. @mnichols1 also recently mentioned in our 1:1 that he has been feeling the uptick in community contributions after switching to groupsource code and had to adjust what he works on.
Proposal
We should find a plan for how we can spread these MR reviews for community contributions around more designers so that we are not overloading certain groups. So far we have mostly stuck to having designers reviewing the community contribution of their own group, but I would propose we switch to a "Reviewer roulette" based model, similar to how our engineers are using it, just for community contributions.
As we can see in the overview, most community contributions fall into the areas of the product that each designer is already using as part of their own daily work. In addition to that, I also noticed that we have a lot more small and mostly visual contributions over the last milestones. I would thus assume that the majority of community contributions could be handled by any of our designers and do not require super deep knowledge of that product area. If a designer then notices that they absolutely do not understand the contribution or how it fits into the larger vision of the group, they can still pull in the original designer for that group.
As a positive side-effect, this would automatically create a bit more cross-stage collaboration and make each designer more aware of the UI and flows in other areas of the product.
How this could work
I hope that we can extend our Dangerbot to look for MRs with the labels UX and Community contribution. When it finds these, it should add an additional row for UX to the "Reviewer Roulette" and adds one random Product Designer here. I have added myself in this MR to demonstrate what this would look like.
