[Avocado-devel] [RFC] Avocado Misc Tests repository policy

[Amador Pahim]

Hello,

We are receiving a big number of Pull Requests in avocado-misc-tests
repository. If on the one hand it is really great to see the community
using and contributing to Avocado, on the other hand the Avocado devel
team should not be that involved in review code of tests, since our
business is to write Avocado itself.

This RFC aims to outline the workflow of the Avocado devel team
regarding the avocado-misc-tests repository.

Motivation
========
The code review is a time consuming activity and review code of tests
is not part of the Avocado devel team business. Given the high number
of Pull Requests on avocado-miscs-tests repository, we need a policy
to officially state our participation there.

Proposal
=======
We don't believe that we should just not to look to the
avocado-misc-tests repository. A good number of bugfixes and features
in Avocado were born as consequence of tests posted there.

To find a balance, the initial proposal is that the Avocado devel
team, currently the only maintainers of that repository, will only get
involved after a third party code review and ACK of a given Pull
Request. That way, the code author should be also in charge of find
someone to review its code, being the reviewer from the same company
or not. We can always invite people to review code there, but it's
essentially the author's responsibility.

For the reviewer, it is expected that he/she:
- Reads the code, commenting with suggestions of improvements: good
practices, general standards, effectiveness of code, verify comments
and docstrings.
- Test the code: run the test and make sure it's working as expected.
- Ping the authors of Pull Requests already reviewed and not updated
for a long time.
- When the code is considered ready, comment the Pull Request with an
'Looks Good To Me'.

The 'Looks Good To Me' comment will be the trigger for the maintainers
to go there and take a final look on the Pull Request and merge it.

Expected Results
==============
The expected result is to decrease the load of Avocado devel team in
regards to the code review in that repository.
Another important expected outcome of this process is to give the
merge permission for (aka promote to maintainer) those assiduous
reviewers with good quality of reviews.
When this RFC is considered ready, we will update our documentation
and the avocado-misc-test README file to reflect the information.

Additional Information
================
Any individual willing to make the code review is eligible to do so.
And the process is simple. Just go there and review the code.
Given the high volume of code coming from IBM, I had a chat with
Praveen Pandey, an IBMer and assiduous author of Pull Requests for
avocado-misc-tests, and he agreed in make reviews in
avocado-misc-tests.


Looking forward to read your comments.
--
apahim