>> 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.
That's a good point. From my observations and interactions with the MozReview team over the months, I believe a great deal of the initial effort has been to lower the ramp for the requestors, as opposed to the requestees. The fact that we're seeing so many review requests go through MozReview might be a sign of success in terms of that work. Anecdotal evidence, along with the sentiments in threads like this (and elsewhere) suggests that it would now probably be worth shifting the emphasis on lowering the ramp for the requestees. I do know that this sort of work has started to get attention from the MozReview team. smaug, as the most prolific reviewer[1] recently filed a bug about interdiffs being busted in particular cases, and it's getting serious attention from the team. So, I guess we need to show some empathy for the requestees as well. I think[2] it's not always clear what the most critical thing to fix for our requestees is. If folks have some wireframes, ascii diagrams, napkins sketches, I'm certain the MozReview team would find that valuable. [1]: All hail the mighty smaug! [2]: Beyond obvious things like, "interdiffs are sometimes wrong", which is clearly something to fix ASAP On 29/01/2016 11:18 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote: > 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... > > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
