Having a dashboard usually opens new paths to understand software development communities. This may be seen as the entry point that helps to understand the basics of a community. And on top of this, there may appear new questions related to those basics or to more advanced issues. This is the case of the new work we are working on with the Wikimedia community metrics analytics team: Core Reviewer and Participants.

• Core reviewers are defined as those developers that can exercise a +2/-2 review in Gerrit. In addition to this, it is of interest for the community to remove auto merges. Although this is an undesired behaviour, that takes place, and those should be removed.
• On the other hand, Participants in Gerrit are defined as any member leaving any type of trace in the system. In this set we can find reviews (-2,-1,+1,+2), uploads, comments and others.

It is interesting to notice that depending on the community, requirements are slightly different. In the case of the OpenStack community, there are extra requirements for the Core Reviewer definition. And this is that reviews should be found in master branch. This specific measure can be found in the OpenStack quarterly reports for each of the projects of the Foundation.

Continue reading “Behind the big numbers on the Wikimedia code review process” →