From a1c444beed87ffd2ca8d646987acf9a3b828205a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Julia Kreger Date: Tue, 29 May 2018 05:55:12 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] Add principles entry for peer review During numerous discussions at the Vancouver 2018 Forum, the topic of discouraging review cultural behaviors came up repeatedly. This has come up before, but never to the point where prior community participants and leaders who took the opportunity to reconnect with the community came into the room and explicitly stated that it was the review culture as to why they left. The common frustration that was repeatedly raised was having to revise patches over and over due to varying nitpicks where negative feedback was left forcing the patch to be updated in order to gain any additional review feedback. We recognize that this is counter productive, and that we need to change our review culture, so we are updating the principles to express the aspects of peer review that we value. Co-Authored-By: Doug Hellmann Change-Id: I3b615784824de2a15a911780fe8c37928f2c453e --- reference/principles.rst | 21 +++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 21 insertions(+) diff --git a/reference/principles.rst b/reference/principles.rst index a11169f45..528e9a76c 100644 --- a/reference/principles.rst +++ b/reference/principles.rst @@ -47,6 +47,27 @@ leadership exists, that leadership is not solely responsible for change. The entire OpenStack community is empowered to identify problems and, where possible, assemble the teams to resolve them. +We Value Constructive Peer Review +--------------------------------- + +Peer review is a fundamental part of our culture. Reviewing submissions of +code and documentation helps us find mistakes and become better programmers +or writers. Peer review helps us build trust among team members and gives +us an opportunity to teach each other about different parts of our software, +CI system, and processes. Without the goodwill of contributors and reviewers, +we would have no community. + +We want review comments to be constructive so that the review process fulfills +its purpose. We do not want reviews to be used to block contributions based on +minor issues, often called "nits". The focus should always be on incremental +improvement of the system as a whole, rather than ensuring each individual +change is perfect. + +We encourage reviewers who find minor aspects of a change they feel need to +be changed, to engage the author in discussion versus downvoting, and +collaborate on how best to move the change forward. Often this may result +in a follow-up change, or revising the change under review. + One Contributor, One Vote -------------------------