Tag: peer

Please welcome the latest new peers to Firefox and Toolkit:

• Johann Hofmann
• Nihanth Subramanya

As you might gather I’ve been updating the peer list a lot lately trying to catch up with reality. If there is anyone I’m missing then please let me know!

So you want to know how someone becomes a peer? Surprisingly the answer is pretty unclear. There is no formal process for peer status, at least for Firefox and Toolkit. I haven’t spotted one for other modules either. What has generally happened in the past is that from time to time someone will come along and say, “Oh hey, shouldn’t X be a peer by now?” to which I will say “Uhhh maybe! Let me go talk to some of the other peers that they have worked with”. After that magic happens and I go and update the stupid wiki pages, write a blog post and mail the new peers to congratulate them.

I’d like to formalise this a little bit and have an actual process that new peers can see and follow along to understand where they are. I’d like feedback on this idea, it’s just a straw-man at this point. With that I give you … THE ROAD TO PEERSHIP (cue dramatic music).

1. Intro patch author. You write basic patches, request review and get them landed. You might have level 1 commit access, probably not level 3 yet though.
2. Senior patch author. You are writing really good patches now. Not just simple stuff. Patches that touch multiple files maybe even multiple areas of the product. Chances are you have level 3 commit access. Reviewers rarely find significant issues with your work (though it can still happen). Attention to details like maintainability and efficiency are important. If your patches are routinely getting backed out or failing tests then you’re not here yet.
3. Intro reviewer. Before being made a full peer you should start reviewing simple patches. Either by being the sole reviewer for a patch written by a peer or doing an initial review before a peer does a final sign-off. Again paying attention to maintainability and efficiency are important. As is being clear and polite in your instructions to the patch author as well as being open to discussion where disagreements happen.
4. Full peer. You, your manager or a peer reach out to me showing me cases where you’ve completed the previous levels. I double-check with a couple of peers you’ve work with. Congratulations, you made it! Follow-up on review requests promptly. Be courteous. Re-direct reviews that are outside your area of expertise.

Does this sound like a reasonable path? What criteria am I missing? I’m not yet sure what length of time we would expect each step to take but I am imagine that more senior contributors could skip straight to step 2.

Feedback welcome here or in private by email.

Please join me in welcoming another set of brave souls willing to help shepherd new code into Firefox and Toolkit:

• Luke Chang
• Ricky Chien
• Luca Greco
• Kate Hudson
• Tomislav Jovanovic
• Ray Lin
• Fischer Liu

While going through this round of peer updates I’ve realised that it isn’t terribly clear how people become peers. I intend to rectify that in a coming blog post.

Please join me in welcoming three new peers to the Firefox and Toolkit modules. All of them are based in Taipei and I believe that they are our first such peers which is very exciting as it means we now have more global coverage.

• Tim Guan-tin Chien
• KM Lee Rex
• Fred Lin

I’ve blogged before about the things I expect from the peers and while I try to keep the lists up to date myself please feel free to point out folks you think may have been passed over.

For a long long time Mozilla has governed its code (and a few other things) as a series of modules. Each module covers an area of code in the source and has an owner and a list of peers, folks that are knowledgeable about that module. The full list of modules is public. In the early days the module system was everything. Module owners had almost complete freedom to evolve their module as they saw fit including choosing what features to implement and what bugs to fix. The folks who served as owners and peers came from diverse areas too. They weren’t just Mozilla employees, many were outside contributors.

Over time things have changed somewhat. Most of the decisions about what features to implement and many of the decisions about the priority of bugs to be fixed are now decided by the product management and user experience teams within Mozilla. Almost all of the module owners and most of the peers are now Mozilla employees. It might be time to think about whether the module system still works for Mozilla and if we should make any changes.

In my view the current module system provides two things that it’s worth talking about. A list of folks that are suitable reviewers for code and a path of escalation for when disagreements arise over how something should be implemented. Currently both are done on a per-module basis. The module owner is the escalation path, the module peers are reviewers for the module’s code.

The escalation path is probably something that should remain as-is. We’re always going to need experts to defer decisions to, those experts often need to be domain specific as they will need to understand the architecture of the code in question. Maintaining a set of modules with owners makes sense. But what about the peers for reviewing code?

A few years ago both the Toolkit and Firefox modules were split into sub-modules with peers for each sub-module. We were saying that we trusted folks to review some code but didn’t trust them to review other code. This frequently became a problem when code changes touched more than one sub-module, a developer would have to get review from multiple peers. That made reviews go slower than we liked. So we dropped the sub-modules. Instead every peer was trusted to review any code in the Firefox or Toolkit module. The one stipulation we gave the peers was that they should turn away reviews if they didn’t feel like they knew the code well enough to review it themselves. This change was a success. Of course for complicated work certain reviewers will always be more knowledgeable about a given area of code but for simpler fixes the number of available reviewers is much larger than it was otherwise.

I believe that we should make the same change for the entire code-base. Instead of having per-module peers simply designate every existing peer as a “Mozilla code reviewer” able to review code anywhere in the tree so long as they feel that they understand the change well enough. They should escalate architectural concerns to the module’s owner.

This does bring up the question of how do patch authors find reviewers for their code if there is just one massive list of reviewers. That is where Bugzilla’s suggested reviewers feature comes it. We have per-Bugzilla lists of reviewers who are the appropriate choices for that component. Patches that cover more than one component can choose whoever they like to do the review.

 

A few things are happening which means there are a bunch of new Firefox/Toolkit peers to announce.

First since I’m now owner of both Firefox and Toolkit I’ve decided it doesn’t make much sense to have separate lists of peers. Either I trust people to review or I don’t so I’m merging the lists of peers for these modules. Practically since Toolkit already included all of the Firefox peers this just means that the following folks are now Firefox peers in addition to already being Toolkit peers:

• Nathan Froyd
• Axel Hecht
• Mark Mentovai
• Ted Mielczarek
• Brian Nicholson
• Neil Rashbrook
• Gregory Szorc
• David Teller

Second we’re updating the list of suggested reviewers in bugzilla for Toolkit. In doing so I found that we have a number of reviewers who weren’t already listed as peers so these folks are now considered full Firefox/Toolkit peers:

• Kit Cambridge
• Tantek Çelik
• Mike Hommey
• Matt Howell
• Mike Kaply
• François Marier
• Nicholas Nethercote
• Gian-Carlo Pascutto
• Olli Pettay
• J Ryan Stinnett
• Andrew Sutherland
• Gabriele Svelto
• Jan Varga
• Jonathan Watt

All of these folks have been doing reviews for some time now so this is largely just book-keeping but welcome to the fold anyway!

It’s that time again when I get to announce a new Firefox/Toolkit peer. Shane has been involved with Mozilla for longer than I can remember and recently he has been doing fine work on webextensions including the new sidebar API. As usual we probably should have made Shane a peer sooner so this is a case of better late than never.

I took a moment to tell Shane what I expect of all my peers:

• Respond to review requests promptly. If you can’t then work with the patch author or me to find an alternate reviewer.
• Only review things you’re comfortable with. Firefox and Toolkit is a massive chunk of code and I don’t expect any of the peers to know it all. If a patch is outside your area then again work with the author or me to find an alternate reviewer.

Please congratulate Shane in the usual way, by sending him lots of patches to review!