Create (or edit) the wiki page for the CI role
Here is part of an email I sent about the CI role.
I want to turn it into a proposed process, by editing the CI wiki page.
One of the failure modes of this role is that the CI people end up fixing a lot of failing tests.
But it's best practice for the original developer to fix the tests that they wrote: it's more efficient, and people learn from their mistakes.
So I'd like to restrict the scope of this role to "make CI pass, quickly".
Usually that means:
- reverting a failing commit,
- marking a failing job as "allow failures", or
- skipping a failing test.
And then logging a bug for a longer-term fix.
We need a separate process to make sure longer-term fixes happen.
We typically have 3 categories of CI bugs:
- consistent failures from a recent commit,
- intermittent failures, which can be from old commits,
- environmental failures from CI infrastructure changes.
We can assign recent failures to the person who wrote the code. (Or a paid staff member, if that person is an occasional volunteer.)
I think the CI people should assign the other two categories of bugs evenly across the team. It's too much for one or two people to fix all the CI bugs.
If we use this scope, the CI role is similar to the review assigner, backport decider/merger, and bug triage roles. It's not our job to fix the bugs, just to triage them, and get CI into a usable state.