Request reviews automatically from appropriate team members

[gtsiolis]

Problem to solve

@roboquat requests automatically reviews from team members across the org (?) that sometimes are not the needed OWNERS for approving and merging a change. For example, see gitpod-io/gitpod#6124 (comment).

This can create emails and notifications that could be skipped, for follow up reviews, comments, etc. Also requires an extra step from the changelist author to update the reviewers list in order to move a PR forward.

Proposal

Request reviews automatically from appropriate team members.

[ArthurSens]

What I believe that what is happening is that we are not using the OWNERS files as they are intended to be used.

I see that even people who have just joined Gitpod and have never added a single line of code are already assigned as Pull Request approvers and reviewers 😬. Imagine the stress put into them when prow already assigns them a super complicated PR while they have no idea how Gitpod works. That is not only stressful but can also be dangerous if they decide to approve without doing a proper review.

Owners of a codebase are meant to be people that are capable of reviewing any pull request that touches that codebase. It is not a way to reflect our team members. The team members of each team can be seen in the Github organization or in Notion.

Not being an OWNER doesn't mean that you are not allowed to review PRs. OWNERS should help and encourage more people to get involved with the codebase they own and, when those new people are feeling confident enough, a particular codebase can have more owners.

One example that I can give here is what I'm currently doing with dashboards and alerts. Even though the responsibility for them lays on each team's hands, I am the only one in the company who has actively worked on it and is 100% confident with reviews, so I set myself as the single OWNER of that codebase.

I'm reaching out and helping anyone who is interested in working on this, hoping that others will become knowledgeable and can slowly become owners.

[csweichel]

The knowledge on the codebase is a fair point.

We could indeed introduce a multi-step model where new folks don't become approver for the first few weeks.