Document to prioritize domain-specific approvals
Problem
The review roulette provides suggestions in the MR via Danger bot. See an example here !119962 (comment 1381754635). It recommends a backend maintainer and also a different Verify maintainer.
In many cases if the Verify maintainer approves the MR, it may cover the backend approval since it's approved by a maintainer already. If the more generic backend approval is requested first, it may not be sufficient for Verify changes since these are domain-specific.
Details
CODEOWNERS sections represent parallel approvals. For example: backend
section and Verify
section are 2 independent approval sets. This MR !119962 (diffs) only changes Verify
backend files. Still the approvals widget shows both backend
and Verify
although Verify
approval is in theory sufficient (for backend code only). If you modify a file outside of the backend
section, you will need approval for a different section, even if the author is a maintainer and they could merge the MR.
Proposal
Clarify the wording in our docs https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/code_review.html#domain-experts that seeking approvals from domain-specific maintainers is recommended for a more efficient code review cycle.