Drupal Needs Review Queue Initiative

The "Drupal Needs Review Queue Initiative" is a targeted effort to address and expedite the review process for issues within the Drupal community. This initiative aims to ensure that issues submitted for review in the Drupal core contributions do not languish in a backlog, some of which had remained unaddressed for up to ten years.

The initiative emerged from a recognition of the limited bandwidth among committers and reviewers within the Drupal community. Its primary goal is to ensure that every issue is reviewed in a timely manner, addressing the challenge of issues that may sit for months without attention, only for contributors to find out later that their submissions require additional tests or do not meet core gates.

Key Aspects of the Initiative Include:

1. Timeliness: The initiative seeks to significantly reduce the wait times for issue reviews. The goal is to ensure that no issue remains unreviewed for more than two months, with efforts to address them even sooner when possible.

2. Core Gates Compliance: Early identification of whether submissions meet the necessary core gates, such as change records, Subsystem maintainer sign-offs, and tests. This proactive approach aims to avoid delays and ensure that contributors receive timely feedback on their submissions.

3. Appropriateness for Core Inclusion: Evaluating whether proposed issues align with core requirements or if they are more suited for contrib modules. This evaluation helps manage the scope of core contributions and ensures that the core remains focused on features and fixes that benefit the broader Drupal ecosystem.

4. Engagement with Expertise: The initiative involves reaching out to experts within the Drupal community for reviews, especially for complex issues or those that fall outside the initiator's expertise. This collaborative approach leverages the collective knowledge of the community to provide comprehensive feedback and move issues forward.

5. Framework managers and Subsystem Maintainer Involvement: The initiative also involves engagement with Framework managers maintainers and Subsystem maintainers, who have specialized knowledge of specific components. This ensures that issues receive attention from those with the most relevant expertise.

The "Drupal Needs Review Queue Initiative" reflects a concerted effort to enhance the contribution process, making it more efficient and responsive to the needs of the Drupal community. By addressing issues more promptly and effectively, the initiative supports the continuous improvement and evolution of Drupal, ensuring that it remains a robust and flexible platform for web development.

Join the Community on Slack

To become a part of the ongoing conversation and contribute to the "Drupal Needs Review Queue Initiative," interested individuals are encouraged to join the dedicated Slack channel, #needs-review-queue-initiative. This channel serves as a hub for discussions, updates, and coordination among contributors working towards reducing the backlog of issues needing review. When the initiative started, the backlog numbered around 2600 issues, and efforts are continuously made to decrease this count through community engagement and collaborative work.

The Needs Review Queue Bot

Supporting the initiative is the Needs Review Queue Bot, an automated tool designed to streamline the review process for issues marked "Needs review" within the Drupal community. Given the prohibitive cost of running full test runs on all such issues every 48 hours, the bot performs limited testing to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in the review process.

Key Functions of the Bot Include:

• Testing Patch or Merge Request (MR) Applicability: The bot checks whether a patch or MR can be applied to the target branch of an issue.
• Running Drupal's Commit Checks: It ensures that submissions meet Drupal's commit standards.
• Issue Status Updates: If a submission fails either of the above steps, the bot adds a comment to the issue and updates its status to "Needs work" to signal that further modifications are required.

Excluding review bot with "no-needs-review-bot" Tag:

• To accommodate situations where an issue should remain under "Needs review" status despite an outdated patch or MR, the bot respects the "no-needs-review-bot" tag. Issues tagged with "no-needs-review-bot" are excluded from the bot's automated checks.

This bot represents a crucial step towards automating and enhancing the efficiency of the review process, with the ultimate goal of integrating similar automated re-linting capabilities directly into DrupalCI or GitLab CI.

Distinction Between the Needs Review Queue Initiative and the Bug Smash Initiative

The Needs Review Queue Initiative and the Bug Smash Initiative are two distinct efforts within the Drupal community, each with its own focus and methodology for improving the Drupal project. While both initiatives aim to streamline the process of managing and resolving issues within Drupal's extensive issue queue, they target different aspects of the project's lifecycle and contributor engagement.

• Needs Review Queue Initiative: This initiative focuses on ensuring that submissions to the Drupal project, specifically those marked as "Needs review," receive timely attention and review. It aims to expedite the review process by reducing the backlog of issues awaiting review, ensuring that contributions have momentum and are seen by the right people quickly. The initiative leverages automated tools, like the Needs Review Queue Bot, to perform limited testing on submissions and facilitate a more efficient review process.

• Bug Smash Initiative: In contrast, the Bug Smash Initiative primarily targets the triage and resolution of bug reports within the Drupal project. It involves identifying, reviewing, and addressing the oldest and sometimes long-neglected bug reports in the issue queue. The initiative focuses on confirming the relevance of these bugs to the current state of Drupal, clarifying issue summaries, ensuring proper documentation, and facilitating the necessary tests or API changes.