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Hi Bruce,

Thank you for bringing up this challenge.

Code reviews are very important, as well as to increase the community’s bandwidth to not just in the ability to review but also approve changes. As you are pointing it out, the community has been experiencing some bottlenecks lately, especially in the latter area.

Thank you for calling out the need to increase the number of active core reviewers. This task can be challenging in any project, and as it’s been recognized on the Community Calls, where we discussed this topic, StarlingX is a complex project, which can make the role of a core reviewer look daunting and overwhelming.

A few ideas that have come up to address this:
- Actively asking contributors whether they have an interest and aspirations to become core reviewers, and work with them to achieve this goal
- Encourage the current core reviewer teams to actively look for candidates, based on their current involvement in reviewing changes
- Establish ways for current core teams to mentor candidates to become core reviewers
- Look for opportunities to reduce the size and complexity of the repos/areas that various core teams are responsible for, and with that lowering the bar to join a core team


I have a few questions, to find out how we can increase the number of core reviewers and increase the community’s bandwidth to approve incoming changes:

- If you’re considering to become a core reviewer
   * What is the biggest obstacle that is currently holding you back from raising your interest or volunteering for the role?
   * What would be helpful resources for you to take next steps?

- If you’re a current core reviewer:
   * Do you have anyone among the current reviewers within your sub-project team who would make a great core reviewer?
   * What do you need to be able to support current reviewers to grow into the role and become part of your core team?


On the topic of reducing the number of ‘+2’ votes that are required before applying ‘W +1’. I suggest to keep the “two ‘+2s’" requirement in place, so the community keeps that as the desired baseline, even if it’s not achievable for all teams at the moment. I would add a few notes to the current guidelines to ease the requirement in case it significantly decreases the ability of a team to land changes, while encouraging to seek for a higher number of ‘+1’ votes and ways to mentor potential new core reviewers. What do you think?

Thanks and Best Regards,
Ildikó


> On Jul 10, 2024, at 1:10 PM, Jones, Bruce <Bruce.Jones@windriver.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to call the attention of the community to the discussion that happened in today’s TSC meeting regarding Core Reviewers for the project.
>  See https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/stx-cores for Greg’s notes on the topic.  I note that he was kind enough to take most of the actions on this topic, but Ildiko also asked me to raise the topic in the community.  So here goes…
>  The StarlingX developer documents [1] currently state that two +2 code reviews from Core Reviewers are required for code to be merged with a WF+1.
>  However, many of the Core Reviewers currently listed in Gerrit are no longer active in the community.  And meanwhile the volume of code submissions to the project has been increasing, placing more work on fewer Core Reviewers.
>  There are several different actions the community could take to address this issue, and I’m going to highlight two of them here, that are quite easy to implement, and raise them as proposals for the TSC and community to consider:
>
>     • We need more Core Reviewers.  If you are an active member of this community and have confidence in your knowledge of the code in one or more parts of the system, please volunteer to be a new Core Reviewer by posting on this mailing list.  The other Cores will be very grateful.
>     • I would like to ask the TSC and the community to consider a softening of the current guidance, for the short term.  My suggestion is “At the discretion of a Core Reviewer, code reviews can be merged with just their own (single) +2”.
>  Thank you very much for your consideration of these proposals.
>      Brucej
>  [1] https://docs.starlingx.io/developer_resources/code-submission-guide.html#id2