ARB Review

[Jono Bacon]

Hi Martin,

On 10 April 2012 15:10, Martin Albisetti <argentina at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Jono Bacon <jono at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> As such, I would like to propose that we have a discussion about these
>> challenges to explore whether we can resolve these issues with the ARB
>> or whether we need to explore another alternative to serve our app
>> developers; I don't think solving this challenge is as necessarily as
>> simple as recruiting more ARB members. This discussion can form the
>> basis of a wider set of discussions at UDS in May in Oakland.
>
> I agree it's critical for us as a project to get this right, and new
> apps flowing smoothly. Now rather than later.
> I do wonder, though, why you think it's not as simple as recruiting
> more members to the ARB, could you expand a bit on that?
> I assume that there's some guesses you have that you may of not
> expressed, so I'm interested in understanding those, without having a
> ton of context, it seems like a classic lack of people/time.

Happy to expand, Martin. I do think an expansion of the membership
would help (and we should consider it), but I think that there are
other areas in which we could drive other efficiencies with it's
resources. A few examples:

 * Application Prioritization - the board does not have any kind of
prioritization facility in MyApps that indicates that App A may be of
more interest/more important/more valuable (or however else we define
priority) than App B. I think given there are more apps than time,
some kind of prioritization would be helpful to ensure that the apps
of most interest to Ubuntu users get to the top of the list. One
possible idea I had here was making the queue open and allowing the
community to go in and upvote/downvote and add comments and for the
ARB to take this content into considerable. Of course it could be
gamed, but I suspect it would provide at least indications of interest
and popularity.

 * Regular Queue Review - from what I have seen there is no regular
cadence around queue reviews. This has meant that the ARB have been
taking a more ad-hoc approach of picking apps whenever each member has
time as opposed to regular meetings and reviewing and moving the
submissions along. I think a regular queue review (either on a mailing
list or on IRC) could be useful.

 * Defining Scope - I didn't see this myself but a member of my team
observed that some ARB members have fixed bugs in some of the apps in
the interests of resolving the issues to get them through the queue.
While an admirable contribution, time spent fixing bugs in one app
takes time away from other apps getting a review so I think it could
be useful to define the scope of app reviews better to focus just on
reviews, not fixing bugs in the apps.

 * Being Stricter With Needs-Information - I have suggested this a
number of times before, but I still see that applications that are
waiting upon feedback from a developer languish in the queue. I think
we should put a strong "if there is no response within a week, it gets
rejected". This will put the responsibility in the developers hands to
be timely, which I think is reasonable given that the ARB is a
community team offering their spare time to provide these reviews.

 * Review Assessment Criteria - I think it could be useful for us to
discuss what kind of criteria the ARB are using to review apps in the
queue. I suspect there are areas in which the ARB could provide a
lighter-weight review while still providing the assurances they
provide around quality and security. As an example, in my (humble)
opinion, if an application installs, can be removed, and does not pose
a security risk, it should get through. If the application is terrible
quality or crashy, the ratings and reviews will tell that story to our
users.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

   Jono

-- 
Jono Bacon
Ubuntu Community Manager
www.ubuntu.com / www.jonobacon.org
www.identi.ca/jonobacon www.twitter.com/jonobacon