In ten days time, the 2016 Gerrit User Summit will open its doors at the Googleplex Campus in Mountain View – CA.
It is going to be an amazing event, with a lot of exciting updates from the Gerrit Community, thanks to the number of innovations that are coming into the platform, from large files support (Git LFS), HTML5 Polymer-based new UX, NoteDB, multi-master updates and a lot more.
Once again, as we always did in the past, we continue to fuel new ideas and innovation to the world of Code Review, with the feedback from the Gerrit User’s Community and developing the ideas as OpenSource, always.
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
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.
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.
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
We started (of course!) talking about the [in]famous force push of 186 Jenkins repositories to GitHub, I was on the Top-10 HackersNews over 7h … so I was expecting the question to pop-up during the interview 🙂
My friend Alex Blewitt took the opportunity as well to forge a Star-Wars like headline for his InfoQ article on what happened.
Git adoption in the Enterprise, where all began
We moved the discussion to the foundation of my business on Git and Code Review and the reasons and challenges that an Enterprise company is facing when moving to Git. We went through the history on how LMIT started GitEnterprise.com and then focused on Gerrit Code Review based product and services for large Enterprises World-Wide: a niche and successful business nowadays.
Gerrit has historically been considered as “more difficult” than GitHub: true in the past but not anymore today apart from the Web User-Experience CSS styling, much nicer and pleasent on GitHub. The availability of http://gerrithub.io allowed over 1,800 developers since October 2013 to get started with Gerrit in less than 5 minutes by watching an Gerrit Introductionary YouTube video: using it was then just 3 clicks away, no installation or configuration needed! The availability of an easy and accessible Public Cloud instance represents a big improvement in accessibility and usability of Gerrit.
For which teams is Gerrit the right choice?
We talked about the “typical learning curve” of people coming from previous version control systems, such as Subversion. Does it make sense to get started with Git and Gerrit at the same time? When is Gerrit needed and when is it going to provide most of its value?
I’ve covered the topic in the past webinars and talks: hands-on Webinars recordings are freely available on-line at:
The size of the project (in terms of number of people x number of repositories) is typically one of the key factors in Code Review adoption. Gerrit however can be used as well as a standalone OpenSource Git Server , even without leveraging its Code Review capabilities: this makes the choice of Gerrit a good first step towards a smoother Git adoption.
What are Gerrit Topics about?
We went through a very interesting discussion about “Gerrit Topic”, a feature that is not new to Gerrit but is sometimes forgotten besides its important and relevance for medium-large teams.
With the forthcoming support of multi-repositories atomic commits in Gerrit, it will be possible to merge multiple changes on multiple repositories at the same time for a single topic. This feature is not ready yet but coming hopefully in the near future and Google Gerrit Team developers and contributors are working on it.
The ability to make an atomic commit across multiple repositories will allow to have a more consistent Jenkins build process as well, with less broken builds because of interdependent changes on multiple components.
Who is using Gerrit today?
We talked about the adoption of Gerrit in the community, which is growing year after year. A lot of medium companies adopted Gerrit in the past, including Spotify side-by-side with GitHub.
The ability to “submit a change” to any project without the risk to break the build is definitely an incentive to encourage even more people to contribute to share the knowledge and improve the code base, without the risk of breaking anything or forking the code. This is one of the reason that drove large OpenSource organisations such as the Eclipse Foundation and OpenStack to the adoption Gerrit Code Review in their tools platform.
How to embrace Code Review in a Team or Company?
We went through an interesting comparison / discussion of Agile Methodology vs. Code Review. Often Teams misunderstand and confuse the concept of “review” with “pair-programming”: the problem was well analysed in my book “Learning Gerrit Code Review” (available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Gerrit-Code-Review-Milanesio/dp/1783289473). I defined the pair-programming as a dot in a time/people space: two developers writing a piece of code at the same time. This however does not exclude all the other points in the time/people space where multiple people at different times will read the code and provide their feedback: pair-programming is then a “specific example” of the “code review space”.
Because of the different perspectives (pair-programming is a dot whilst code-review is a “cloud of dots” in time/people space) they are not one exclusive of the other: they are equally important and both enable effective collective code ownership and knowledge sharing.
References and greetings.
It has been a very long but interesting discussion with Thomas and hope you’ll enjoy it.
See below the links of the resources we mentioned during the interview:
The Gerrit User Summit 2014 is about to start in only 2 days: it is going to be a two days of exciting news and innovations on the world of Code Review. There are names from the largest industries in the world that have adopted the Code Review workflow in large enterprise environments: Google, SAP, SonyMobile, Ericsson, IBM, Garmin, HP, CollabNet, GerritForge, Codenvy, Eclipse Foundation and LibreOffice.
During all this week there is a special promotional discount on the Learning Gerrit Code Review book. Additionally, for the attendees of the conference, there will be a limited number of signed paperback copies available at the session “Gerrit or GitHub? Take both !”
In order to redeem the book promotion, scan the QR code and enter one of the following PROMO-CODEs:
Book PROMO-CODE: LGCRB20 eBook PROMO-CODE: LGCReB20
The Gerrit User Summit Agenda has been published yesterday and has a lot of very interesting talks and announcements:
Day 1 – Friday 21st of March
What’s new in Gerrit 2.8 (David Pursehouse – Gerrit maintainer – SonyMobile)
Scaling Gerrit at Ericsson (Patrick Renaud, Vladimir Cantiru, Hugo Ares – Ericsson)
Monitoring Gerrit (Doug Kelly – Garmin)
Browsing Repository Content with Gerrit’s REST API (Simon Kaegi – IBM)
Gerrit plugins made easy with Scripting (Luca Milanesio – GerritForge)
The Angular revolution in Gerrit! (Dariusz Luksza – CollabNet)
The day 1 would end with a very interesting Q&A with the Gerrit User Community about the features they would like to see coming up in the next forthcoming releases!
Continuous Development with Gerrit (Tyler Jewell & Luca Milanesio – Codenvy & GerritForge)
The day 2 will end with a meet-up with food and drinks sponsored and organised by Codenvy where the Gerrit Community can discuss and exchange their post-Summit impressions and ideas on the future of Code Review.
It is going to be again a huge leap forward for the Code Review community and the Git and Gerrit projects improvement !
On March 22nd, come see Codenvy CEO Tyler Jewell and Gerritforge CEO Luca Milanesio present at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, CA. They’ll cover Codenvy’s continuous delivery system for integrating code reviews, git, and SAAS developer environments in order to eliminate waste in the development workflow.
The interest in Gerrit Code Review is growing, possibly because of the increase of the Git adoption in the OpenSource and Enterprise and consequently the need of a set of best-practices on how to effectively manage a Git workflow when teams are growing: we do expect many new attendees this year !
Key information for the conference
Dates: Friday and Saturday March 21st-22nd, 2014
Location:GooglePlex – Mountain View, CA
Registration:Pre-registration is required, space is limited and registration is first-come, first serve. You can register NOW using the Application Form
Have something to share and present in a talk ?
Talks are open and you can submit your proposal using the Talk Proposal Form. We are expecting again the Gerrit plugins, scalability and the new UX to play an important role in the conference. Share your experience and how you managed to integrate the Code Review process in your Team !
Hope to see many of you at the Conference in March 2014.
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