Policy for stalled package reviews

Policy for dealing with stalled package reviews

Occasionally package reviews fail to make forward progress due to lack of response from one of the parties involved in the review. This policy addresses two classes of reviews: those stalled because the review submitter is not responding, and those which have been assigned to a reviewer and are stalled because that reviewer is not responding. The idea is to move the ticket to a state where other interested parties can submit the package or take over the review. Of course there is no intent to punish anyone, and tickets can always be assigned back to the same reviewier or reopened.

Digest

Reviewer not responding

• When a review ticket is assigned to a reviewer who does not respond to comments for one month, a comment is added to the ticket indicating that the review is stalled and that a response is needed soon.
• If there is no response within one week, the fedora‑review flag is set to the empty value. The ticket is reassigned to nobody@fedoraproject.org (use the Reassign bug to owner and QA contact of selected component radio button for this) with the intention to move the ticket back to a state where another reviewer can work on it.

Submitter not responding

• When the submitter of a review ticket has not responded to comments for one month, a comment is added to the ticket indicating that the review is stalled and that a response is needed soon.
• If there is no response within one week,the ticket is closed with resolution NOTABUG, and the fedora-review flag is set to the empty value. The intention is to close the bug so that it can be submitted by someone else in a separate bug, and also to make it easy to find bugs closed in this way.

Reviews stalled due to lack of reviewer response

When a review ticket has been assigned to a reviewer and that reviewer has not responded to comments for one month:

• A comment should be added to the ticket indicating that the review is stalled and that a response is needed soon.
• If there is no response within one week:
• The FE-REVIEW blocker is removed and FE-NEW replaces it
• The ticket is reassigned to nobody@fedoraproject.org. (Currently there is no UNASSIGNED state to move the ticket to, so this address is used to indicate thta the ticket is not assigned to anyone.)

The intent is to move the ticket back to a state where another reviewer can work on it. The original reviewer can of course take the ticket again, but they should be urged to respond in a more timely manner.

Reviews stalled due to lack of submitter response

When the submitter of a review ticket has not responded to comments for one month:

• A comment should be added to the ticket indicating that the review is stalled and that a response is needed soon.
• If there is no response within one week:
• The ticket is closed with resolution NOTABUG.
• The FE-NEW blocker is removed and is replaced by FE-DEADREVIEW.

The intent is to close the bug so that it can be submitted by someone else in a separate bug, but also to make bugs closed in this way easy to find. If the bug is resubmitted by someone else, it is also reasonable to change the resolution on the closed bug to DUPLICATE and mark it as a duplicate of the new bug so that reviewers of the new ticket can easily find the work that was done on the old one.