Team Structure

This document describes the structure of the Fuel team and how it is used to organize code review, design discussions, and overall technical decision making process in the Fuel project.

Problem Description

Code review is the primary tool for day to day interactions between Fuel contributors. Problems with code review process can be grouped into two buckets.

It is hard to get code reviewed and merged:

  1. It is hard to find subject matter experts and core reviewers for the specific part of codebase, especially if you are new to the project.
  2. Contributor sometimes receives contradicting opinions from different reviewers, including cores.
  3. Without an assigned core reviewer, it is hard to guide a feature through architectural negotiations and code review process to landing the code into master.
  4. Some commits are waiting for a long time for a reviewer.

Quality of code review itself could be better:

  1. Reviews are not thorough enough. Instead of examining the whole patch set and identifying all problems in one shot, a reviewer can leave a -1 vote after identifying only one minor problem. This increases number of patch sets per commit, and demotivates contributors.
  2. Some of the core reviewers decreased their involvement, and so number of reviews has dropped dramatically. However, they still occasionally merge code.
  3. As a legacy of the past, we still have old core reviewers being able to merge code in all Fuel repos. All new cores have core rights only for single repo, which is their primary area of expertise.

Having well defined areas of ownership in Fuel components addreses most of these problems: from making it easier to identify the right reviewers for your code, to prioritizing code review work so that core reviewers can spend more attention on smaller number of commits.

Proposed Policy

Definitions

Contributor:
Submitter of a code review, who doesn’t necessarily work on Fuel regularly, may not be familiar with the team structure or with Fuel codebase.
Maintainer:

Subject matter expert in certain Fuel area of code, which they regularly contribute to and review code of other contributors into this area. For example: network checker or Nailgun agent would have their own lists of maintainers.

List of maintainers for different parts of a Fuel git repository is provided in a MAINTAINERS file at the top level of that repository. A repository that contains multiple components may have multiple MAINTAINERS files in the component subdirectories.

Core Reviewer:
Maintainer who has maintained high level of contribution and high quality of code reviews and was promoted to core reviewers team by consensus of other core reviewers of the same Fuel component.
Fuel PTL:
Project Team Lead in its OpenStack standard definition. Delegates most of the review and design work to component teams, resolves technical disputes across components.

Code Review Workflow

Typical commit goes through the following code review stages:

  1. Contributor makes sure their commit receives no negative votes from CI. When possible, contributor also invites peers to review their commit, preferably from different locations to help spread out the knowledge of the new code.
  2. Contributor finds the maintainers for the areas of the code modified by their commit in the MAINTAINERS file, and invites them to the review.
  3. Once maintainer is ready to add +1 code review vote to the commit, they invite core reviewers of the modified component to the review.
  4. A commit that has a +2 vote from a core reviewer can be merged by another core reviewer (may be the same core reviewer if the repository has only 2 or less core reviewers).

Governance Process

Fuel PTL is elected twice a year following the same cycle and rules as other OpenStack projects: all committers to all Fuel projects (fuel-* and python-fuelclient) over the last year can vote and can self-nominate.

Fuel aggregates features provided by Fuel components. Components could be either Fuel driven (like Nailgun, Astute, UI) or generic in a sense that Fuel is not the only use case for such components (e.g. Keystone, potentially Neutron, Ironic, Glance, etc.). Component teams are independent but should interact with each other while working on features.

Core team of a component is responsible for code review in their component. It is totally up to a component team (not Fuel team as a whole) to decide whether they resolve review conflicts by consensus or they delegate their voices to a formal or inforaml component lead. It should be up to a component team how they share review responsibilites and how they make architecture and planning decisions.

Core reviewers are approved by consensus of existing core reviewers, following the same process as with other OpenStack projects. Core reviewers can voluntarily step down, or be removed by consensus of existing core reviewers. Separate core reviewers list is maintained for each Fuel git repository.

Maintainers are defined by the contents of the MAINTAINERS files in Fuel git repositories, following the standard code review process. Any contributor can propose an update of a MAINTAINERS file; a core reviewer can approve an update that has a +2 from another core reviewer; if the update adds new maintainers, it must also have +1 votes from all added maintainers.

Since components could be generic there must be two levels of design. By-component design specs describe component changes that are not necessarily related to Fuel and these specs are out of the scope of this policy. Fuel design specs describe Fuel features that usually require coordinated changes in multiple components. Each Fuel spec must be reviewed and approved (+2) by matter experts from at least the following backgrounds (even if respective section is empty):

  • Web UI
  • Nailgun&Orchestration
  • Fuel Library

It is up to the Fuel-specs core team to involve other SMEs to review a particular spec if specific expertise is required.

Alternatives

Flat project structure

Many other OpenStack projects keep a flat team structure: one elected PTL, and a single list of core reviewers for the whole project. The advantage is a more simple and straightforward governance process. The disadvantages are described in the problem description.

Implementation

Author(s)

Primary author:
mihgen (Mike Scherbakov)
Other contributors:
angdraug (Dmitry Borodaenko) kozhukalov (Vladimir Kozhukalov)

Milestones

The current policy was put in place for Mitaka, and updated for Newton.

Work Items

N/A

References

Note

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode