Monthly Archives: October 2016

Code Review Analytics at Gerrit User Summit

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I love hiking mountains; I always did since I was a child. There is a mix of challenges, enthusiasm, and learnings in walking for long hours through little and tortuous steep trails: it challenges your mind and body and makes you stronger.

One thing that always fascinated me is how the shape of peaks and valleys changes as you go higher and raise your perspective. When finally, exhausted, you reach the mountain peak you have a mix of pleasure and relief. You have achieved your goal, and you can, at last, have the full view on the horizon, understand how mountain chains are linked together, where rivers start and end up in lakes, and you can see far away as never before.

Continuous Delivery is a landscape of rivers, lakes, and mountains

I believe today’s landscape of Software Engineering is very diverse: there are so many powerful tools that generate streams of data continuously, and we need to get on top of them every day to be successful in an ever-evolving market space.
Continuous Delivery is the key methodology that nowadays allows the entire “software production chain” working smoothly. However, it poses challenges which are not always technical but often related to the flow of information across the systems and people.

See the big picture

To succeed, we need to raise our point of view to see the “big picture” and understand how things are connected and where are the improvement points, considering all the data we have about:

  • Tools
    collect software and system metrics, logs, test results, build trends
  • Projects
    repositories, commits, branches, pull requests, patch sets
  • People and Teams
    active and passive collaborators, contributors, reviewers, comments and replies

Collecting data is not enough, we need to raise our point of view and hike the Continuous Delivery mountain of problems and reach a point where all those elements make sense because they are:

  • all visible from a single perspective
  • correlated
  • aggregated

Yet another BigData problem

The problem is too many data sources to manage.
The typical solution to the problem is taking all logs from everywhere and publishing them to a single repository using an ELK (ElasticSearch + Logstash + Kibana) stack and building fancy dashboards. I have used this approach for small-scale projects, and it works quite well, but … when I tried to scale that to a much bigger Continuous Delivery pipeline the complexity, diversity, and granularity of data just killed my ability to see the “bigger picture” and I felt almost helpless in front of my Kibana dashboards.

Back to the source of data

Trying to understand what was missing, I ended up realizing that some of the dimensions were not taken into account and correlated: Code Reviews.

All the tooling were about test results, build, system and application logs but none of them has taken the code into account, which is the source of all the pipeline. You can understand where to go if you realize where you are coming from: the code is the source of all build chains.
When I started collecting data from the code repository and reviews, all made sense again, and I felt the I have reached the peak of my Continuous Delivery hiking effort: all made sense again and I could see the overall perspective.

Continuous Delivery Analytics

Exactly in the same way we Application Analytics are used to collecting data about our production system, split into dimensions and analyzed, we need then to start doing the same with our Continuous Delivery pipeline.

There are already some of the tools out there in the market which integrates some parts of it, but I haven’t seen a single one who can give you the bird’s eye perspective you need to understand the big picture.

That’s why I started writing one, using the only way make sense for me: writing in the open and with the help and cooperation of the OpenSource community of people and companies who share the same problem and have the same perspective.

Gerrit Analytics coming at the User Summit 2016

I presented my ideas at a couple of conferences (Devoxx, JenkinsWorld) and I received a lot of appreciation and feedback: the next one is the Gerrit User Summit in Mountain View – CA.

Large companies like SAP, Qualcomm, Ericsson,  Google and Intel are exchanging every year their problems and ideas on how to make their Continuous Delivery Pipelines smoother, better and faster.
The perspective will be, of course, more Gerrit Code Review centric with more data and views that make sense from a review perspective.

Call to action

Come to the Gerrit User Summit 2016 in Mountain View – Google HQ on the 12th and 13th of November, and see the Gerrit and Continuous Delivery Pipeline in Action.

The event is FREE, register now at https://goo.gl/forms/oeEnQweHl2noNSnn1

 

Gerrit Summit 2016 is coming

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Four weeks from now, the eighth edition of the Gerrit User Summit will open its door at Google HQ in Mountain View – CA, 12th-13th of November 2016.
It has been a long journey since the first GitTogether in 2008, and after the split between the Git[Hub Universe] summit and the traditional “unconference” style Gerrit event at Google’s, things have changed quite a lot. While Gerrit remained a 100% OpenSource user-centric project, GitHub has attracted $350M in VC, and they have been losing traction over the years to join the unconference-style events.

What’s new this year?

For the first time, the proposals of talks to the Gerrit User Summit are submitted in Gerrit directly (yeah!) on the summit/2016 repository.

The list of currently approved talks is available by searching for “status:merged project:summit/2016” (https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/#/q/status:merged+project:summit/2016)
The talks awaiting review are under “status:open project:summit2016” (https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/#/q/status:open+project:summit/2016)

How cool is that? I foresee already a Doodle plugin for Gerrit 😉

How to register for the User Summit?

Shawn Pearce has prepared a Registration Form for you to sign-up to the event:
https://goo.gl/forms/oeEnQweHl2noNSnn1

Once you access the Registration Form at the above URL, you need to sign-in with your Google Account credentials and then complete the following information:
– Your name
– Your Organisation
– Your previous attendance to the user summit
– Any dietary restrictions

The User Summit is FREE for EVERYONE, including novice users of Git and Gerrit Code Review, but you would need to register beforehand.
The Summit is a unique opportunity to learn about Gerrit new feature, contribute to the product roadmap with your needs and requirements and, most of all, network with other users to learn new use-cases where Gerrit can be very helpful.

How to submit my talk proposal?

Well, you need to demonstrate a good understanding and use of Gerrit Code Review if you want to teach and talk to other people about it! At the end of the day, if you want to talk about Gerrit you should be able to clone a repository and submit a patch to a project 🙂

If you need just a little help … see my “Diffy super super talk” example:

$ git clone https://gerrit.googlesource.com/summit/2016 && (cd 2016 && curl -Lo `git rev-parse --git-dir`/hooks/commit-msg https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/tools/hooks/commit-msg ; chmod +x `git rev-parse --git-dir`/hooks/commit-msg)
$ cd 2016
$ cat - > sessions/my-amazing-talk.md
# My amazing talk at Gerrit User Summit

Hi folks, this is my super-duper-talk. You should be interested in it as I will unleash the dark force of Code Review Diffy Kung Fu Review Cuckoo.

*Diffy, Birds & CO. Inc.*
^D
$ git add sessions/my-amazing-talk.md && git commit -m "Diffy super-duper talk"
$ git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master

Talks highlights.

There are already some fascinating talks submitted and approved and more will undoubtedly come in the next couple of weeks. We will start sharing some highlights of what’s happening at the conference. Here is the overview of the first talks.

What’s new in Gerrit 2.12 and 2.13

Two major versions of Gerrit have been released since the last summit in 2015, and they contain significant improvements to the platform:

  • Topic submission workflow – aka Git commits across repositories  (v2.12).
    Group multiple changes in a “topic” and having them merged as a whole, even across multiple repositories, in a single submit operation.
  • GPG signed pushed verification (v2.12).
    Allows people to upload their GPG public keys into Gerrit and have them used to verify Git signed commits.
  • Large File Storage support (Git LFS) (v2.13).
    Gerrit finally supports the automatic management of large files outside the Git repository. The feature is fully pluggable and exposed via plugins. Amazon S3 and Local file system support are available at the moment, but more plugins are here to come on this feature.
  • Gerrit metrics (v2.13).
    Expose the internal metrics to external consumers. The feature is exposed for plugins to gather this data and send to external systems for analysis and visualization purposes. Graphite, ElasticSearch, and JMX plugins are available.
  • Hooks plugin (v2.13).
    Finally, the Gerrit hooks mechanism have been entirely externalized and implemented in a pluggable way. The legacy hooks have become a core plugin. However, you can now leverage the new extension to develop a new-generation of hooks by leveraging the new extension points provided.
  • New HTML5 UX with WebComponents – PolyGerrit preview (v2.13).
    The next generation of Gerrit UX based on Polymer Web components is available. Even though not complete, offers a sneak preview of what the new interface looks like and, if you like it as-is and is good enough for your use-cases, you can enable and start using it already. Both GWT and Polymer-based UX are using the same REST API, and thus the changes generated and reviewed with them are 100% interoperable.

There is more to come.

In the next few days we will keep on publishing the highlights of the topics coming at the Gerrit User Summit this year, stay tuned and REGISTER NOW at:
https://goo.gl/forms/oeEnQweHl2noNSnn1

The GerritForge Team.