Calling for Issue Triagers, a new Workflow and the Carson Butler

September 2, 2015 • Published by Ryan Weaver

The activity on the Symfony repository is huge: new issues and pull requests are created every day, and often these are legitimate bug reports and high quality pull requests. To continue the health and advance the quality of the project, it's critically important to confirm bugs and review pull requests as quickly as possible. If you find and report a real bug but get a slow response from the community on the issue tracker, that means that many other people may experience this same bug before it's fixed.

The only scalable solution is the community: you. More than anything, Symfony needs "triagers": the wonderful people who find an issue for a potential bug, reproduce it, then comment. Or, people who find a pull request, review (and try) the code, and comment. These people are the un-sung heroes of Symfony, like Stof, xabbuh, WouterJ, jakzal and others. But we need more. How can we empower people?

The Carson / Workflow Experiment

"How can I help?" That's a common question and we should always have a clear answer. So, we're introducing an experimental new workflow for the issues: one that uses labels to track issues/PR's through their life-cycle, from "Needs Review" to "Needs work" to "Reviewed". If you have some time to help, just find a Needs Review issue, review it, then change its label status

How can you change the status label? Just add a comment:

Status: Reviewed

Status: Needs Work

A new bot - CarsonBot will parse the comment and update the status. The more the community reviews, the faster we can close issues and merge pull requests.

We have a big beautiful new article describing how to review and use this new system: Community Reviews.

This is just an experiment, but if it works well, we can make it better. Ultimately, we want to encourage the smart people in the community to help with the project they love and use everyday.

Published in #Community #Symfony

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Comments

Victor Bocharsky said on Sep 2, 2015 at 14:19

Nice experiment, I hope it'll accelerate Symfony's workflow.
And really a clear answer. Thank you, Ryan!

Felipe Martins said on Sep 3, 2015 at 02:53

Looks nice.

Tristan Bessoussa Certified said on Sep 6, 2015 at 18:20

How can the new system help this issue to be reviewed ? https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues/15464

I tried commenting with needs review but It doens't seems to work.

Layton Everson said on Sep 7, 2015 at 00:12

I think the term "smart people" is a little insulting... maybe it can be replaced with something to denote seasoned developers. I'm personally in the 1 percentile of intelligence and don't contribute yet because I'm simply not that good yet.

Cameron Junge said on Sep 7, 2015 at 02:58

@Tristan: It looks like your issue isn't in the "Needs Review" status, and above it says "Status: Reviewed" needs to be used. Looks like your issue is slipping thru the gaps, unfortunately.

Ryan Weaver Certified said on Sep 7, 2015 at 15:14

@Tristan: I just updated the status on your issue - you just forgot the "Status: " prefix (we decided to require that to avoid false matching. Anyways, you already did the hard work of reproducing a fork. Unfortunately, that doesn't automatically mean someone will jump on and fix it (especially in the form component where stuff is quite complex), but it makes it more likely.

@Layton " Ultimately, we want to encourage the smart people in the community to help" - I meant "smart people" as a compliment - I'm saying our community has a lot of really smart people, I'm not calling on a specific "smart" segment alone to help. Sometimes, you don't have to be a super expert to help - e.g. if someone reports a bug with some details on how to reproduce but doesn't actually make a fork, if you're able to create a fork using that information, that's a huge help :).

Cheers!

Alex Rock Certified said on Sep 7, 2015 at 19:59

What's awesome is that the bot's name is Carson. I love Charles Carson the butler.

But what's quite hard is that Symfony is so big that most of the developers are not completely aware of what happens "behind" in Symfony. Plus, there are so many concepts, design patterns, best practices, and any newcomer has many reasons to be scared of doing silly things, me the first.
And last, cloning the repo is very long because the project is very heavy :D

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