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Pause reviewer roulette DB pings for Joao Cunha

João Alexandre Cunha requested to merge Alexand-master-patch-f536 into master

Why is this change being made?

The team challenge

For awhile now, the Distribution team has been adopting a longer response review time than the company-wide guidance. See the Distribution review response service-level objective.

On the past months we've been hitting an even longer response review response time. The team is working hard and implementing many measure to try to bring this time down.

My personal challenge

Besides being reviewer of the Distribution scoped projects, I'm currently a maintainer or reviewer of many projects, which are outside the Distribution team scope:

  # projects maintained or reviewed by me outside of the Distribution team
  auto-build-image: maintainer
  cluster-applications: maintainer
  helm-install-image: maintainer
  gitlab-zoekt: reviewer
  gitlab:
    - maintainer database
    - reviewer backend

Additionally, I'm also assigned as direct reviewer for some renovate-bot automated dependency updates on the gitlab project, which are also not directly related to Distribution.

The union of all these contributions outside the Distribution team takes a considerable amount of my focus out of the team.

Lastly but not least, I moved from the Configure group to the Distribution in the beginning of this year. Before this I was in the Configure group for 3.5 years straight, which means I had all the process well under my domain. I was an expert in almost all the subjects related to that group. Right now, there's still a lot of important and time consuming things I need to learn and improve within the Distribution context. So, more of my time and dedication towards this team is needed so that I can ramp up quicker and support the team better.

One of the actions I took within the Distribution team is to become an Omnibus GitLab trainee maintainer. But I also can't benefit from being a trainee maintainer and getting more Omnibus reviews, since I constantly have to block my self for the reviewer roulette, because I'm getting a lot of pings from multiple projects or because I'm involved in very long reviews for other projects.

The proposal

Considering all this, and also the fact that I'm a Omnibus GitLab trainee maintainer, I'd like to temporarily reduce the amount of contributions I do outside of the Distribution team, so that I can:

  • Spend more of my time with Distribution focused reviews, thus supporting the team to improve its review response SLO.
  • Make use of the roulette without having to set my GitLab status to 💡 (focusing on their team’s work)
  • Become a Omnibus GitLab maintainer quicker.

While I believe that it's very important for all of us contribute widely across the company, and I'm very proud and happy to do that, I feel like I need to rebalance my efforts at this time.

I believe that pausing the roulette suggestions for Database reviews is the best way, since these is the kind of review that is most time consuming from all the others.

I'm proposing to reevaluate activating the DB review roulette once I become an Omnibus GitLab maintainer and the team reaches our target review response SLO levels again.

Author and Reviewer Checklist

Please verify the check list and ensure to tick them off before the MR is merged.

  • Provided a concise title for this Merge Request (MR)
  • Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per say why, not just what
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  • Assign reviewers for this MR to the correct Directly Responsible Individual/s (DRI)
    • If the DRI for the page/s being updated isn’t immediately clear, then assign it to one of the people listed in the Maintained by section on the page being edited
    • If your manager does not have merge rights, please ask someone to merge it AFTER it has been approved by your manager in #mr-buddies
    • The when to get approval handbook section explains the workflow in more detail
  • For transparency, share this MR with the audience that will be impacted.
    • Team: For changes that affect your direct team, share in your group Slack channel
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    • Company: If the update affects all (or the majority of) GitLab team members, post an update in #whats-happening-at-gitlab linking to this MR
Edited by João Alexandre Cunha

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