Code Review: Sharing the load

• Situation: Many reviews in queue for long time (forever?)
  • Android: They have a button: Find "Maintainers" (Plugin for Gerrit)
  • Thiago: Would solve the first 15 Minutes for Contributors, not enough
  • Improve the culture, appreciate the effort ("Thank you!")
  • Get more people on-board as reviewers (not as approvers yet)
  • Idea: Should not be +1 and +1, should be "Thumbs up" and "Tick!"
    • Some reviewers don't understand the implication of "+1" (two "+1" != "+2")

• What does a good patch looks like?
  • breaking patch up into multiple patches
  • Is the documentation really good enough (opinions vary)

• Ask contributors whose changes have just been review to review others (sometimes happens)

• Gerrit
  • Sanity bot is good
  • Revive early warning bot!
    • Should changes only be approved after tests has run on CI?
    • Can we get a "small CI" run (just Linux, "does it build?")
    • Should the bot automatically run tests if tests have been changed?
    • Should the bot automatically give a warning if tests have not been added (excluding doc only changes)?
  • "Auto defer" bot is currently not active, would be useful to automatically defer patches where contributor did not response to requests.
  • Automatically stage when change is approved? Faster turnaround time.
  • Mail (monthly?) reports to maintainers (or others?) (based on gerrit dashboard config?): "N Changes approved, but not staged? Link to staging page", List per module?
  • Let's try it and see how it works out

• Gerrit Features unused right now
  • Attach labels
  • Bot could apply hashtags ("wants adoption", "stage-me")
  • Has a feature to make clazy automatically appply improvements to the change ("contributor has to click a button")

• Public Community Feedback does not exist
  • Alex: Use Thiago's script to highlight new contributions (Grafana?)? "Welcome new contributor!" for blog post (Like KDE does)?

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Follow-up session extensions (lots of overlapping topics)

• Give contributor feedback
  • Bot should say: "Welcome, Thanks for your first contribution"
  • Monthly blog post advertising external contributors?
  • Send out physical awards? T-Shirts, "Thank you" letter, …?

• Make contributing easier
  • Put contributor documentation into Qt's documentation ("Gettings started")?
  • Link freenode IRC Web-Backend to simplify access to IRC for new contributors
  • Use Qt account profile to setup everything needed for contributing (ssh keys, CLA check, ...)
  • Adapt github workflow (Checklist "Auto test done", "Documentation done", ...)

• Triage bugs
  • Add Jira label ("for juniors")?

• Community
  • Missing Community manager (Consent: Yes, it's needed)
  • Missing "qt-project" entity, kind of a foundation? Funding?
  • Redefine: What is the qt-project?

• Activating new contributors
  • Communication of Qt (company) targets companies, not community (qt.org ⇒ qt.io ⇒ sales)
  • Microsoft pushes its stuff to universities, why not Qt (or qt-project?)
  • Qt project needs a proper homepage. With nice, contemporary Howtos, ...