Pairing new patch pilots with old patch pilots

[Martin Pool]

On 7 July 2011 05:12, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 04:40:34PM +0200, Daniel Holbach wrote:
>> Hello everybody,
>>
>> at UDS the question came up if we could double up new and old pilots to
>> effectively train new patch pilots and make it easier for new pilots to
>> get involved.
>>
>> What do you think about this? Especially as a new pilot/reviewer, what
>> was your experience like?
>
> Aside from your write-up I don't recall having many other questions.
> But I'd been doing sponsoring for a while before that.
>
> Mostly it is knowing how to do packaging.  When I first started at
> Canonical I recall you ran a packaging class at one of the sprints
> which I found to be very helpful.
>
> 90% of piloting is easy; the other 10% is weird packaging corner cases.
> Perhaps some sort of "packaging challenges" class or something would be
> useful?

It's worth remembering that (at least as I define it), it's not the
patch pilot's job to necessarily personally review every single
change; they just need to make sure some action happens on it.  That
could be giving a review that's not definitive but gives some
feedback, or it could be asking for a review from someone more
experienced, or asking them how they'd handle it.  Almost any action
is better than just leaving things sit in the queue.

>> If this is deemed helpful, what would a good process/format for this be?
>
> It probably doesn't need much process.
>
> "If this is your first time patch piloting, you may feel more
> comfortable being a co-pilot your first few runs.  Find a pilot in
> your timezone and reschedule your time to coincide with theirs."
>
> Beyond that, I'd say encourage new pilots to go through some packaging
> classes to bone up on skills.

That sounds good

Martin