Documentation Review Process

The maintainers and working group leads of the Istio Docs Working Group (WG) approve all changes to the Istio website.

A documentation reviewer is a trusted contributor that approves content that meets the acceptance criteria described in the review criteria. All content reviews follow the process described in Reviewing content PRs.

Only Docs Maintainers and WG Leads can merge content into the istio.io repository.

Content for Istio often needs to be reviewed on short notice and not all content has the same relevance. The last minute nature of contributions and the finite number of reviewers make the prioritization of content reviews necessary to function at scale. This page provides clear review criteria to ensure all review work happens consistently, reliably and follows the same quality standards.

Review content PRs

Documentation reviewers, maintainers, and WG leads follow a clear process to review content PRs to ensure all reviews are consistent. The process is as follows:

1. The Contributor submits a new content PR to the istio.io repository.
2. The Reviewer performs a review of the content and determines if it meets the acceptance criteria.
3. The Reviewer adds any technical WG pertinent for the content if the contributor hasn't already.
4. The Contributor and the Reviewer work together until the content meets all required acceptance criteria and the issues are addressed.
5. If the content is urgent and meeting the supplemental acceptance criteria requires significant effort, the Reviewer files a follow up issue on the istio.io repository to address the problems at a later date.
6. The Contributor addresses all required and supplemental feedback as agreed by the Reviewer and Contributor. Any feedback filed in the follow up issues is addressed later.
7. When a technical WG lead or maintainer approves the content PR, the Reviewer can approve the PR.
8. If a Docs WG maintainer or lead reviewed the content, they not only approve, but they also merge the content. Otherwise, maintainers and leads are automatically notified of the Reviewer's approval and prioritize approving and merging the already reviewed content.

The following diagram depicts the process:

{{< image width="75%" ratio="45.34%" link="./review-process.svg" alt="Documentation review process" title="Documentation review process" >}}

• Contributors perform the steps in the gray shapes.
• Reviewers perform the steps in the blue shapes.
• Docs Maintainers and WG Leads perform the steps in the green shapes.

Follow up issues

When a Reviewer files a follow up issue as part of the review process, the GitHub issue must include the following information:

• Details about the supplemental acceptance criteria the content failed to meet.
• Link to the original PR.
• Username of the technical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
• Labels to sort the issues.
• Estimate of work: Reviewers provide their best estimate of how long it would take to address the remaining issues working alongside the original contributor.

Review criteria

Our review process supports our code of conduct by making our review criteria transparent and applying it to all content contributions.

Criteria has two tiers: required and supplemental.

Required acceptance criteria

• Technical accuracy: At least one technical WG lead or maintainer reviews and approves the content.
• Correct markup: All linting and tests pass.
• Language: Content must be clear and understandable. To learn more see the highlights and general principles of the Google developer style guide.
• Links and navigation: The content has no broken links and the site builds properly.

Supplemental acceptance criteria

• Content structure: Information structure enhances the readers' experience.
• Consistency: Content adheres to all recommendations in the Istio contribution guides
• Style: Content adheres to the Google developer style guide.
• Graphic assets: Diagrams follow the Istio diagram creation guide.\
• Code samples: Content provides relevant, testable, and working code samples.
• Content reuse: Any repeatable content follows a reusability strategy using boilerplate text.
• Glossary: New terms are added to the glossary with clear definitions.