Manage reviewers load better via reviewer queues
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Problem to solve
Currently, we don't have a reliable way to optimally distribute the workload between all reviewers and maintainers across all teams' MRs during the release. Often, a particular reviewer is overloaded with MRs to check, burning them out and from another hand making him a bottleneck.
Target audience
GitLab team and contributors
Further details
When an MR is ready, it's authors usually looks for the reviewer or maintainer at the projects page of the handbook. But it does not tell anything about the current reviewer's workload. A reviewer, when assigned, starts looking someone less burdened and re-assign to another reviewer, and this goes on.
Proposal
- Create a the publicly visible single source of truth telling how many MRs are currently being reviewed by a particular reviewer or maintainer
- This SSOT should be either editable by reviewers (maintainers) or automatically react to the current state of things at GitLab.com
- Set a limit of MRs allowed for simultenous review by a single reviewer
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Decrease of the time spent by MRs in Review state according to GitLab CE and GitLab EE Cycle Analytics at GitLab.com
Links / references
Automatic display of current workload of reviewers could be made possible after adoption of multiple assignees per MR.