Find and train more backend maintainers for gitlab-ce / gitlab-ee
I wrote this script to count the backend maintainers we've had over time: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/count-backend-maintainers-over-time/bin/count-maintainers
It may have some bugs (our team page has changed a lot over the time period), but this is what it gave me, which feels close enough for my purposes:
| Date | Maintainers | Developers | Developers per maintainer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-07-01 | 5 | 26 | 5.2 |
| 2017-01-01 | 6 | 25 | 4.2 |
| 2017-07-01 | 7 | 29 | 4.1 |
| 2018-01-01 | 8 | 31 | 3.9 |
| 2018-07-01 | 8 | 47 | 5.9 |
| 2018-10-24 | 9 | 53 | 5.9 |
Adding @stanhu (gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!15765 (merged)) gives us 5.3 developers per maintainer, which still seems a little high, but basically manageable. I think somewhere in the 4-5 range is the ideal.
We currently have 23 (by my count) vacancies, which would mean we'd need another 5 (!) maintainers to accommodate those hires.
This leads me to a couple of thoughts:
- We should find and train more maintainers now, rather than relying on people nominating themselves.
- We should not explicitly look for more managers who are maintainers (@DouweM and I are the two right now), but we shouldn't remove the existing two, either - that would make it worse!
- As per https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/code_review.html#getting-your-merge-request-reviewed-approved-and-merged, I don't think we should be looking for team-specific maintainers for GitLab CE and EE.
@gitlab-com/backend-managers @ayufan @dbalexandre @DouweM @dzaporozhets @grzesiek @nick.thomas @rspeicher @rymai what do you all (yes, I want to hear from everyone if possible) think?