On Saturday 14 August 2010 21:33:39 Geoffrey Hutchison wrote:
I’d like to get some discussion about Gerrit and our current workflow.
I’ll start out with a suggestion. I think we should try out Gitorious and
its merge request code review instead of Gerrit.
I don’t think Gitorious gives us more, in fact the feature set is not as well
developed for what we would be moving to it for… At Kitware, part of my
responsibilities have involved examining development workflow.
I honestly believe Gerrit is one of the best of breed tools, and I have
started to communicate with Gerrit upstream a little. They have added a new
feature in 2.1.4 where you can tag all commits as belonging to a particular
topic branch (this help in looking at an entire topic branch) for example.
I think our old system (i.e., no review, frequent merging) wasn’t stable. I
personally pushed code when it wasn’t yet considered ready by the author.
I think the code review is good and is catching problems and improving
code quality, in general.
Agreed.
But I think we’re really slowing down our progress. So I’d like to see if
we can find a happy medium. In particular, not as many people check the
“verified” box.
I think we need to find a happy place with code review, and I don’t think
changing tools will do that. I am trying to build it into my week to sit and
do code review (as it happens I had set aside some time to do so today). I
would rather slow development a little and improve our code quality.
Code review has many benefits, including educating new contributors, preventing
bad code from being merged, catching new issues earlier, rubber ducking
(spotting obvious mistakes the original developer missed)… Gerrit has great
Git integration, and is being actively developed.
Code review is new to us, and for small obvious patches it should be much more
of a two minute “yep, that looks fine”, whereas bigger changes do warrant more
thorough review. It would probably be helpful to go over workflow, and document
some of these thoughts.
I upgraded us to the latest release earlier in the week too.
Marcus
Marcus D. Hanwell, Ph.D.
R&D Engineer, Kitware Inc.
(518) 881-4937