Pull Request Triage

This document outlines how the Desktop team handles pull requests, to ensure a consistent process for contributions from the core team and the community.

The Review Process

1. Contributor opens a pull request. If the pull request is still in progress it should be created in draft mode.
2. When a pull request in progress is ready, the contributor should mark it as ready for review.
3. A member of the reviewer team will give it a quick look over and add the ready-for-review label and add it to any relevant release board.
4. A reviewer with bandwidth will appear.
5. Reviewer assigns the PR to themselves.
6. Reviewer leaves line comments with suggestions or questions.
7. When the reviewer is done they comment on the PR with an emoji, meme, pokémon, or words to that effect.
8. The contributor responds to feedback, makes changes, etc.
9. When the contributor is ready for the reviewer to re-review, they comment on the PR with an emoji, meme, pokémon or words to that effect.
10. Goto 6 until both parties are happy with the PR.
11. The reviewer hits the big green merge button and deletes the branch (if applicable).

Merged contributions are first published to the beta channel (we aim to publish new versions weekly if contributions are available) before then being published to the production channel (we aim to publish new versions on a monthly cadence).

When The Review Is Done

We're using GitHub's review tools to co-ordinate feedback, and we like to be methodical with our reviews, so you'll probably end up with one of two results:

• Approved: nothing else to do; the contribution is great! :gem:
• Request Changes: there are things to address; reviewer provides details :memo:

Reviews can take a few iterations, especially for large contributions. Don't be disheartened if you feel it takes time - we just want to ensure each contribution is high-quality and that any outstanding questions are resolved, captured or documented for posterity.

Assignees

The reviewers team uses the Assignee field to indicate who "owns" the review process for a contribution. While others can add their reviews to a pull request - and large features will likely have multiple reviewers - it's up to the assignee to take charge of the process and see it through to the end.

If a reviewer is feeling overloaded, or if a review has stalled, the reviewer may remove themselves from a pull request. This helps others know where they can help out to share the load.

Everyone Reviews

While everyone has their own domain expertise around the codebase, we encourage people to share the load of reviews and reviewing areas of the codebase that aren't as familiar. This spreads knowledge across the team

24 Hours Cooling Off

After being approved, most contributions will remain in this state for at least 24 hours before merging. The review team does this to ensure everyone on the team, who are normally spread around the world, has a chance to provide feedback about the changes.

No Self-Merges Without Review

We encourage a strong review culture, and contributors should not merge their own PRs unless there are exceptional reasons.

Examples of exceptional situations:

• #2733 was pinning a dependency that affected our continuous integration tests by installing the incorrect version

• #4319 was a minor packaging change introduced unexpectedly on development but would affect everyone when they updated their local repositories.

These should be called out by the merging person with an explanation for why they are bypassing the review process.

Stale Pull Requests

A reviewer will return to an open and reviewed pull request if, after 14 days:

• no response has been received from the contributor, or
• no new commits have been made to the pull request

This is done to ensure we keep the number of reviews under control.

The reviewer should ask if the contributor is still interested in working on this, and indicate that they are welcome to open a fresh pull request later if they lack the time currently to continue on.

If it's agreed to put this contribution on hold, or if no feedback is received after 3 days, the pull request will be closed.