[
Date Prev][
Date Next][
Thread Prev][
Thread Next][
Date Index][
Thread Index]
[
List Home]
|
Re: [jdt-dev] JDT-Core: Report on Gerrit code review
|
Hi Enrico,
I feel I can give you a more substantial answer in free prose rather than making
check marks in a questionnaire. While it's just my personal view, sharing this
via the mailing list might also help to find out if the team agrees in these
respects.
Background: My professional live spans years of research, "industrial" software
development & open source development (in my spare time).
The perspective of people doing JDT development as their Job may slightly differ
from my perspective, but I don't think the difference is huge.
My first guess from looking at your report was: "that looks like a proposal for
a new management tool". To which my immediate reaction is: "In JDT we hardly
need any management tool (on top of bugzilla & gerrit), because we have very
little management". We have team leads who are primarily developers themselves,
who just additionally coordinate a bit more and occasionally need to give the
essential +2 or -2 in case of doubt. On top of that Dani and the PMC do IMHO a
good job in not getting in our way, not making our job harder than just to find
solutions to known problems (this is meant in an entirely positive sense).
Perhaps Dani would be the only person using a management tool, but I feel he
already knows everything he needs to now about the development, as he is
involved directly in many bug discussions already.
I don't want to imply, reports are generally not needed, but we developers rely
more on technical reports that indicate when some aspect of quality is going
south, when technical debt is being created etc.
Things would look differently with my industrial hat on. In that context I would
be ambivalent about this kind of report:
On the one hand, perhaps a closer look at the review process would help
management to better understand development.
On the other hand, I would be afraid that management would take a report and
then "decide" that, e.g., changes in visual representation and/or structure need
to be reduced in favor of functional changes. If that would happen, then it
would make the life of developers harder, rather then better, with questionable
outcome.
If you ask a manager, and he answers, "cool, now I better understand my
developers", this would be a good outcome. If he answers "cool, now I can better
control my developers" I would be worried.
I think one of the hardest parts during reviewing is the human aspect of it: in
many cases in JDT a review is the first contact between a contributor and a
reviewer (committer), and we still have to establish a mode of operation between us.
Another question could be: would I as a developer draw benefit from a report of
*just my own review activity*? Would it tell me s.t. I'd like to improve but
didn't realize? I'd tend to say I already know all that, but I *might* be wrong :)
best,
Stephan
On 17.08.19 18:13, Enrico Fregnan wrote:
Dear JDT-Core developers,
I am Enrico, a researcher at the University of Zurich and I am studying how to evaluate the code review process to understand how it could be improved.
I created a tool that analyzes the changes that happen during a review on Gerrit, to measure the effects of code review on code and understand which kinds changes reviewers pay attention to.
For example, are you aware that many of the changes happened during a code review in the last year in your project involve documentation issues?
You will find this and more data about your project at the following link:
https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5169941/Code-review-changes-report-JDT-Core
The link contains the report and some questions we would like to ask you about it. The report is designed in a way that you don't have to answer the questions (if you just want to look at the report), but it would be great if we could know what you think about our tool/report. Answering will take you no more than 5 minutes.
If you have any question about the report or our research, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Thank you very much for your time.
Cheers,
Enrico
_______________________________________________
jdt-dev mailing list
jdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or unsubscribe from this list, visit
https://www.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/jdt-dev
