How-To

Tips for surviving the OpenStack review process

Reviews aren’t the end goal, but quality and modern code shipped on time is. Veteran Neutron contributor Ihar Hrachyshka on how to keep the end in mind.

April 5, 2017
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Ihar Hrachyshka is a seasoned OpenStack Neutron contributor. He joined the community back in Havana (2013) and is proud to be part of Red Hat OpenStack Networking team.

In the OpenStack community, we often emphasize that reviews are very important and that the best way to get up to speed with the community and to understand how it operates, as well as to get things done, is to join the hordes of reviewers for the project of your interest.

Indeed, reviews from newcomers are of enormous importance: doing reviews gives you a broader picture of what happens beyond the small thing that is most dear to your heart; it naturally aligns team members along parallel efforts, it’s a good learning experience both for authors as well as reviewers themselves and of course it helps to catch bugs before buggy code merges.

Last but not least, good reviewers are eventually promoted to core reviewers and it’s hard to know if you are good at something without trying it, so it makes sense that core reviewers are expected to prove their review record before getting access to +Workflow button. And so, we emphasize the need for everyone to take part in reviews, but we don’t tell people how to do it right.

Of course, people make mistakes, and that’s OK. Core reviewers are no different. More so, falling into the whirlpool of day-to-day reviews sometimes blurs the whole picture of why we do them in the first place (to merge code), with reviewers contesting around how many -1s they can put on others’ patches, however tiny the spotted mistake is. Nit picking and yak-shaving traditions in OpenStack community are well known and can  frustrate and alienate some contributors, especially newcomers.

And so I posted a thread of tweets to remind people that we share our love for OpenStack with the idea that reviews are not the end goal, but quality and modern code shipped on time is.

Superuser is always interested in community content- get in touch at editorATopenstack.org

Ihar Hrachyshka
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