On 1/29/16 10:42 AM, Mike Conley wrote:
most of the feedback is via negativa[2]
That's definitely no good, I agree.
Attacking the MozReview team is also not ok, obviously.
and nobody is really forcing you to use MozReview.
Well, sort of. A review requester who uses Mozreview is forcing the
review requestee to use MozReview to some extent.
That said, I've seen some review requestees blanket unset review flags
on any MozReview request, in an attempt to get review requests they
actually want to deal with.
Note that either way there is bad feeling here as a result: either the
review requestee feels like the review requester is forcing them into a
bad workflow, or the review requester feels like the review requestee is
forcing them into a bad workflow.
Since making the review requester feel crappy is not generally
considered good, most review requestees don't push back on MozReview
requests, even if they find it very frustrating to work with. I think
this dynamic is at the heart of a lot of the angst about MozReview:
people just feel put upon.
I see teams using GitHub pull requests, Reviewable, Opera
Critic, Reitveld, and Splinter in parallel with MozReview.
This works well in reasonably isolated team.
As you might have noticed, the people who seem to be complaining about
MozReview the most are the ones who (1) do a lot of reviews and (2) do
them across a wide swath of the codebase. Item (1) means they already
have a well-worked out review workflow, and MozReview would initially be
slower and more annoying even if the UI were perfect. It also means
that they represent a disproportionate portion of all the reviews
done.[1] Item (2) means they can't just ask all the potential review
requesters to not use MozReview, because asking a review requester to
remember the preferred review system on a per-requestee basis is nuts.
So there's some combination of "this is different" and "this is worse"
here, and as usual disentangling them is a bit hard. As you say,
concrete bug reports are the way to go.
are - this is where filed bugs come in[4]).
As a personal anecdote, in the last 5 months I've reported what looks
like 7 bugs that significantly affect my ability to use MozReview
effectively, and there is one more that I would have reported were it
not reported already. Of these, two have been addressed. I'm not
blaming the MozReview team here; they have limited resources, other
commitments, and I can't be the only person reporting bugs! But, again,
we end up with a dynamic where people are effectively being told "use
it; if you run into issues, file bugs and keep using it", but the bugs
take a long time to address and in the meantime using it is frustrating.
Again, not the fault of the MozReview team, but that doesn't make the
frustration less.
I agree that if people were not feeling forced into using it and could
just report the bugs and then wait for them to be fixed while using
something else, they would be a lot less worked up around this.
Try MozReview. If it doesn't work for you, maybe use something else, and
try it again in a few months once the team has had a chance to address
the bugs you hopefully filed.
This is reasonable advice for review requesters, but not for review
requestees, per above. :(
The bad news is that I don't know what advice to give requestees,
including myself, here. What I've been doing personally is just the
"stop, take a deep breath, relax" routine whenever I get a mozreview
request, but the fact that the routine is necessary is a bummer...
Again, I mean no disrespect here. I just want to gently suggest that we
exercise some restraint while hammering on the MozReview team
Fully agreed, and apologies if I've said things that came across that way.
-Boris
[1] To quantify this, if smaug is doing 6 reviews (bugs, not changesets;
more changesets) per calendar day, then a set of UI annoyances that adds
5 minutes per review is a big deal: that's 3.5 hours out of his work
week. It's obviously a less big deal for someone doing one review every
three days. I did not make up the numbers for smaug, and we have plenty
of people who average one review every few days, for sure...
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