[asterisk-dev] Changes to Review Board Access

[Matthew Jordan]

Hello everyone!

For some time now, the Asterisk project has used Review Board [1] for
performing code reviews on submitted patches. While having a patch be
formally reviewed has never been a hard requirement for its inclusion,
over time, the status quo in the project has evolved such that patches
of any reasonable complexity are nearly always reviewed before being
included. This is not a bad thing - code review is an invaluable tool
in ensuring quality in the Asterisk project. However, some technical
limitations with how accounts are configured in Review Board made it
difficult for everyone to submit patches and participate in the review
process. The situation today is that the vast majority of patches on
the issue tracker are only looked at when they are first put up for
code review. This has led to some high quality patches not being
included in the Asterisk project as fast as they otherwise could.

This weekend, we finalized the integration of Review Board with
Atlassian Crowd, the service that provides user identification and
authentication for the rest of the Asterisk community services. This
removes the bottleneck - namely, me! - that prevented any contributor
from submitting patches for peer review.

For users who currently have an account in Review Board, if your
username is the same as your Atlassian (JIRA) username, simply use
your Atlassian password when logging in. Reviews that you currently
have open will still be associated with you. If your existing username
in Review Board is different than your Atlassian username, you will
unfortunately need to re-open the reviews you have in Review Board. If
that happens to be the case, contact me in #asterisk-dev or reply to
this e-mail and we'll work it out.

For users who do not currently have an account in Review Board, if you
signed a License Contributor Agreement in JIRA, this change opens
Review Board up to you. Instructions for posting patches to Review
Board can be found on the Asterisk wiki [2], as well as workflow
guidelines for participating in code reviews [3]. The wiki has other
items to help you prepare a patch for review, including a check list
of items to be aware of when performing a review or submitting a patch
[4], as well as the project coding guidelines [5]. Finally, because
this change opens up Review Board to a much larger audience, the patch
submission process has been clarified on the Asterisk wiki [6].

Please remember that this may greatly increase the volume of code
reviews being submitted. Contributors are highly encouraged to
participate in other code reviews as well, and to be patient with any
submission they make. Patches that are accompanied by well written
explanations, conform to the coding guidelines, and have accompanying
unit tests and/or functional tests in the Asterisk Test Suite are
always easier to review and will naturally move through the review
process faster.

As always, thank-you for your support and participation in the
Asterisk project - we hope that these changes make the process easier
and more beneficial for everyone.

Matt

[1] https://reviewboard.asterisk.org/
[2] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/x/FYBJ
[3] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/x/T4CoAQ
[4] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/x/W4CoAQ
[5] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/x/LoA4
[6] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/x/QoCoAQ

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org