Gervase Markham: Old Reviews

One project I haven't had time to get to this summer is doing something about old reviews. Having old reviews lying around is very bad, because it leads to discouraged new contributors. These are often people who don't know how to make sure the have asked the right person for review, or how to agitate to get their review done. Basically, it would run like this: Allocate a module to each Bugzilla Component Find all reviews older than a certain date in that component Email a link to that list to the module owner The module owner would then be in a position to go through the list and either cancel the reviews, poke the existing reviewer (if still involved in the project), or reassign the review to someone more likely to do it. It's not a magic bullet, but it splits a big hairy problem into smaller chunks and allocates them to the people most likely to be able to do something about them. Stage 1 is the complicated part, and that's where I got stuck (with a proposal to move the Module Owners List to a wiki in order to make it easy to add ancillary data like this). So you'd probably need to write a parser for the HTML version of the Module Owners List (because getting the data out of despot directly is hard). view original article
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:53:57 +0200

more Planet Mozilla articles