Category Archives: user summit

How Git and Gerrit are Re-Tooling for the Age of AI

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A Special Report from the Gerrit User Summit 2025

First, a huge thank you to the OpenInfra Foundation for hosting this event in Paris. Their invitation to have the Gerrit User Summit join the rest of the community set the stage for a truly collaborative and impactful gathering.

Paris last weekend wasn’t just a conference; it was a reunion. Fourteen years after the last GitTogether at Google’s Mountain View HQ, the “Git and Gerrit, together again” spirit was electric.

On October 18-19, luminaries from the early days (Scott, Martin, Luca, and many others) reconvened, sharing the floor with the new generation of innovators. The atmosphere was intense, filled with the same collaborative energy of 2011, but focused on a new set of challenges. The core question: how to evolve Git and Gerrit for the next decade of software development, a future dominated by AI, massive scale, and an urgent demand for smarter workflows.

Here are the key dispatches from the summit floor.

A Historic Reunion, A Shared Future

This event was a powerful reminder that the open-source spirit of cross-pollination is alive and well. The discussions were invigorated by the “fresh air” from new-school tools like GitButler and Jujutsu (JJ), which are fundamentally rethinking the developer experience.

In a significant show of industry-wide collaboration, we were delighted to have GitLab actively participating. Patrick’s technical presentation on the status of reftable was a highlight, but his engagement in discussions on collaborative solutions moving forward with the Gerrit community truly set the tone. It’s clear that the challenges ahead are shared by all platforms, and the solutions will be too.

Scaling Git in the Age of AI

The central theme was scale. In this rapidly accelerating AI era, software repositories are growing at an unprecedented rate across all platforms—Gerrit, GitHub, and GitLab alike. This isn’t a linear increase; it’s an explosion, and it’s pushing SCM systems to their breaking point.

The consensus was clear: traditional vertical and horizontal scaling is no longer enough. The community is now in a race to explore new techniques—from the metal up—to improve performance, slash memory usage, and make core Git operations efficient at a scale we’ve never seen before. This summit was a rare chance for maintainers from different ecosystems to align on these shared problems and forge collaborative paths to solutions.

Dispatches from the Front Lines: NVIDIA and Qualcomm

This challenge isn’t theoretical. We heard powerful testimonials from industry giants NVIDIA and Qualcomm, who are on the front lines of the AI revolution.

They shared fascinating and sobering insights into the repository explosion they are actively managing. Their AI workflows—encompassing massive datasets, huge model binaries, and unprecedented CI/CD activity—are generating data on a scale that is stressing even the most robust SCM systems. Their presentations detailed the unique challenges and innovative approaches they are pioneering to tackle this data gravity, providing invaluable real-world context that fueled the summit’s technical deep dives.

Beyond the Pull Request: The Quest for a ‘Commit-First’ World

One of the most passionate debates centered on the developer workflow itself. The wider Git community increasingly recognizes that the traditional, monolithic “pull request” model is ill-suited to the “change-focused” code review that platforms like Gerrit have championed for years.

The benefits of a change-based workflow, cleaner history, better hygiene, and higher-quality atomic changes—are driving a growing interest in standardizing a persistent Change-ID for each commit. This would make structured, atomic reviews a first-class citizen in Git itself. The collaboration at the summit between the Gerrit community, GitButler, JJ, and other Git contributors on defining this standard was a major breakthrough.

This shift is being powered by tools like GitButler and JJ, which are built on a core philosophy: Workflow Over Plumbing. Modifying commits, rebasing, and resolving conflicts remain intimidating hurdles for many developers. The Git command line can be complex and unintuitive. These new tools abstract that complexity away, guiding users through commit management in a way that feels natural. The result is faster iteration, higher confidence, and a far better developer experience.

AI and the Evolving Craft of Code Review

Finally, no technical summit in 2025 would be complete without a deep dive into AI. The arrival of AI-assisted coding is fundamentally shifting the dynamic between author and reviewer.

Engineers at the summit expressed a cautious optimism. On one hand, AI is a powerful tool to accelerate reviews, improve consistency, and bolster safety. On the other, everyone is aware of the trade-offs. Carelessly used, AI-generated code can weaken knowledge sharing, blur IP boundaries, and erode a team’s deep, institutional understanding of its own codebase.

The challenge going forward is not to replace the human in the loop, but to strengthen the craft of collaborative review by integrating AI as a true co-pilot.

A Path to 100x Scale: The GHS Initiative

The most forward-looking discussions at the summit centered on how to achieve the massive scale required. One of the most promising solutions presented was GHS (Git-at-High-Speed). This innovative approach is not just an incremental improvement; it’s a strategic initiative designed to increase SCM throughput by as much as 100x.

The project’s vision is to enable platforms like Gerrit, GitLab, and GitHub Enterprise to handle the explosive repository growth and build traffic generated by modern AI workflows. By re-architecting key components for hyper-scalability, GHS represents a concrete path forward, ensuring that the industry’s most critical SCMs can meet the unprecedented demands of the AI-driven future.

The Road from Paris

The Gerrit User Summit 2025 was more than a look back at the “glorious days.” It was a statement. The Git and Gerrit communities are unified, energized, and actively building the next generation of SCM. The spirit of GItTogether 2011 is back, but this time it’s armed with 14 years of experience and a clear-eyed view of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Antonio Barone – Gerrit Maintainer, Release Manager
Luca Milanesio – Gerrit Maintainer, Release Manager, Gerrit Engineering Steering Committee
Jacek Centkowski – Gerrit Maintainer

Gerrit User Summit 2023 – Recap and Survey Results

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The Gerrit User Summit 2023 took place in-person simultaneously in Sunnyvale, California on September 30th and in Gothenburg, Sweden until October 1st 2023. To accommodate the global community, it was live streamed on GerritForge TV so that individuals in various locations could participate, share their experiences, and contribute their ideas.

If you were unable to attend the Summit, you can find all the presentations and content online . Additionally, recordings of the presentations and Q&A sessions can be accessed on GerritForge’s TV channel on YouTube.

Stats and attendee feedback around the 2023 Summit

Snapshot

  • 2 days
  • 2 locations
  • 84 registrations
  • over 70% attendance
  • 34 companies
  • 16 sessions
  • 18 presenters from 8 organisations

Despite the challenges posed by the time difference, the community still got involved showing its commitment.

What is the opinion about the Summit?

A survey was sent to all of the attendees on both locations and even though there was a 30% response rate in USA and 17% in Sweden we delved into the details, and these are the comments received:

Q1: How would you rate the Gerrit User Summit 2023 edition?

GUS 2023 - Rate - Sweden

GUS 2023 - Rate - USA

While in USA, 9% of the respondents rated their experience at a 10, 55% rated it at a 9 and 36% gave an 8; in Sweden the great majority rated it with an 8. Where 10 was the highest positive rate, this feedback gives an idea of how satisfied attendees were in general with the User Summit. Understanding individual experiences and perceptions allows us to evaluate the event and identify areas for improvement.

Q2: What did you like the most about the 2023 Summit?

Attendees in California were thoroughly impressed with the technical excellence of the talks at the event and appreciated the valuable networking opportunities. On the other hand, Gothenburg attendees raved about the fantastic space and location of the venue. They found the off-camera discussions, presentations, and Q&A sessions incredibly interesting and enjoyable. Thought the use of Slido for Q&A was highly effective, giving attendees ample time to contemplate and engage with the speakers.

They also loved hearing organisations share their stories and the collaborative atmosphere for creating new design documents and proof-of-concept code. The attendees were left with the impression that the event brought together a multitude of talented individuals who delivered engaging talks. The event left high expectations for upcoming features and created an enthusiastic, positive atmosphere.They truly valued the chance to engage with fellow attendees and found the experience rewarding.

Q3: What did you not like about the 2023 Summit?

Attendees from both locations expressed their concern about the division of the summit into two locations and time zones, which made it challenging to connect with the entire group. While the idea of having simultaneous locations was appreciated, attendees in Gothenburg felt disadvantaged as they were unable to ask live questions to presenters due to the time difference with the USA. It was recommended not to repeat this approach in future events. However, overall, the attendees had a positive experience at the summit. They expressed their wish for Google to attend in the future and highlighted a missing feature in Slide that would allow for the separation of topics in questions.

Some attendees preferred the event to be held on weekdays rather than weekends, as it affected their personal time. Additionally, they expressed a preference for more user/project-driven success stories, as opposed to focusing solely on development and administrative topics. Some attendees also noted that there was a lack of diversity in the companies present. In Gothenburg in particular, they suggested choosing a venue with less noise for dinner to facilitate networking. Lastly, it was reported that the attendance felt to be relatively low especially in Gothenburg where the venue could have hosted hundreds of attendees.

Q4: What was your main objective in attending the Summit?

The attendees had two main objectives in mind: learning and networking. Going into further detail, they expressed various specific goals, including sharing research findings and enticing potential industrial partnerships. They were also keen on staying updated with the latest developments in the Gerrit ecosystem and gaining insights into how Gerrit is utilized within the community. Meeting people face-to-face was highly valued, as it provided a more personal and direct means of communication compared to email or Discord. Additionally, attendees wished to actively participate in the open-source Gerrit community and discover new directions for the product. Some mentioned that they were excited about the opportunity to listen to James Blair. For some attendees, the event offered a chance to reconnect with Gerrit after a period of absence. Some emphasised in the fact that fostering a positive open-source software community was a shared aspiration, alongside the desire to learn about how organisations utilise Gerrit in their processes. Overall, the attendees were motivated to make the most of the event, seeking knowledge exchange and valuable connections.

Q5: Do you consider to have achieved the objective?

A decisive 100% said to have achieved their goal by attending the Summit.

Reactivating the Gerrit community

Given the initiative to create a group of monthly in-person meet-ups (GerritMeets) to revive the community in the Bay Area (CA), in-person attendees at the summit in Sunnyvale, CA, were asked about their topics of interest, if they would attend in person, remotely live or watch the recorded content afterwards, and if they would participate by giving a talk.

Respondents agreed 100% that they would be willing to give a talk. They differed in the mode of attendance, as opinions were evenly divided between attending in person, joining remotely via live streaming, and accessing the recorded content after the meetup. The suggested topics were:

The invitation to these periodic meetings was extended to the global community and when asked for topics of interest, the topic ‘Hacking’ was added.

What’s next for 2024?

  • GerritMeets will start every month in 2024, from February. GerritMeets is periodic in-person meetup in the Bay Area, with the intention to live stream, so the global community can join as listener as well as with a talk, so everybody can learn & share knowledge and experience.
  • With Gerrit 3.9 been released in November 2023, 2024 will be the year of Gerrit 3.10, in May, and 3.11, in November.
  • Gerrit User Summit will be back in the autumn of 2024 with more interesting talks from the community

A genuine thank you goes out to all the participants and presenters who made the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2023 a great success. We look forward to another exciting and even more engaging get-together next year in 2024!

Yolanda Jasso
Gerrit Code Review – Community Manager

Watch the Gerrit User Summit 2022 online

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The Gerrit User Summit 2022 will start next week, on the 10th of November, at 9:00 GMT at CodeNode in London, 10 South Place London EC2M 7EB.

One of the last seats available on-site can be still yours, REGISTER NOW at at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gerrit-user-summit-2022-tickets-424995963367.

If you cannot come to London to attend face-to-face, the entire event will be live-streamed on the internet on GerritForge’s live stream channel, already successfully used in the past for the Summit 2019 in Sunnyvale.

How to register

You can pre-register for the online event by visiting https://live.gerritforge.com and clicking the orange button “Register to Watch.”

You would need to provide your name, e-mail, and affiliation (specify “independent” if you are attending just for personal interest) and your consent to be contacted with detailed instructions on the day of the event.

You may also request to be included in future communications about the subsequent events organized by GerritForge Inc. for the Gerrit Code Review community.

On the 10th of November 2022, around one hour before the event, you will receive via e-mail all the instructions for watching the event.

Thanks again for coming to London or watching and engaging with the event remotely.

See you next week at the Gerrit User Summit 2022 !

Luca Milanesio – GerritForge
Gerrit Code Review Maintainer, ESC member and Release manager.

The Gerrit User Summit 2022 is back, save the date!

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Dear fellow Gerrit User,
We are pleased to announce that GerritForge will be organizing this year’s Gerrit User Summit and Hackathon in hybrid mode: face-to-face and online.

The event is FREE; register and reserve your seat now at:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gerrit-user-summit-2022-tickets-424995963367

Gerrit User Summit is the event that brings together Gerrit admins, developers, practitioners, and the whole community, in one place, providing attendees with the opportunity to learn, explore, network face-to-face, and help shape the future of Gerrit development and solutions.

After two years of remote meetings and virtual conferences, this year, we are back face-to-face at CodeNode in the heart of the vibrant City of London.

The dates will be:
Nov 7th to 9th – Hackathon
Nov 10th to 11th – User Summit

Shortly we will be publishing the full schedule and logistics for the event.
I look forward to meeting all the community’s friends, face-to-face or virtually, again during the Hackathon & Summit.

Thanks for being a part of the Gerrit community, and we look forward to seeing you in November.

Luca Milanesio
Maintainer, member of the Engineering Steering Committee, and Gerrit Code Review Release Manager

2022 GOALS for Gerrit

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The year 2021 has been a challenging one because of the COVID-19 global emergency; nevertheless, the Gerrit Code Review project has continued to deliver what the community expected:

GerritForge delivered on the promise of making Gerrit more cloud-native, with a particular focus on AWS, the platform that most users have adopted for running in the cloud. GoogleCloud has also been our focus, assuring a cloud-neutral approach to Gerrit and providing support for events over PubSub.

Focusing on Gerrit unique values

A successful product focuses on what makes it unique and innovative, compared to anything else in the world.

We believe that the key aspects that make Gerrit Code Review THE platform of choice for developing software based on Git repositories are:

  • Large-scale
    Gerrit is THE best platform for developing large-scale projects, huge monorepos, and a large number of changes and refs.
  • Maximum availability
    Large organizations and communities of developers need a platform that is always available, anywhere, anytime, 24×7, and 365 days a year.
  • Performance
    The need to work remotely poses multiple issues, one of them being the increase of network latency. Gerrit multi-site distribution of the repositories and reviews allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to clone, push and review at optimal latency and performance.
  • Quality of tracing of reviews
    Gerrit is based on single-commit code reviews, a winning approach in terms of review accuracy and supporting changes chains, and full traceability of the entire review history and workflow.

Many popular Git code-review tools exist in the Open-Source community; Gerrit is the winning choice when scale, availability, performance, and quality do matter.

GerritForge goals for improving Gerrit in 2022

Scale Gerrit beyond limits

GerritForge and the rest of the community have worked hard to identify the bottlenecks of large mono-repos with Gerrit. Some of them can be mitigated by keeping the Git repository lean and organized, despite the massive amount of push traffic and reviews coming from large teams.

We want to focus on improving at least ten times the following KPIs, without having a significant impact on the overall system performance:

  • Number of changes and refs in a repository: millions of changes and tens of millions of refs
  • Size of the repository: hundreds of GBs

GerritForge will step up its involvement in the JGit project in 2022 and introduce many innovations, some of them already implemented in the C-Git implementation:

  • JGit support for multi-pack index
  • Revamp of JGit cache, allowing the pluggability of high-performance implementations
  • Improvement of JGit bitmaps for large number of refs
  • Support for high-performance large storage systems
  • Introduction of new performance metrics
  • Replace Prolog with native submit rules in the owners plugin

99.999% up-time

GerritForge maintains a free service known as GerritHub.io to demonstrate what Gerrit can do and achieve. GerritHub.io is the most advanced and reliable Open-Source vanilla Gerrit deployment, apart from Google’s.

GerritHub.io uptime in 2021 – checked and reported by PIngdom.com

We achieved an astonishing 99.99% SLA in 2021; we want to push the GerritHub.io uptime further to 99.999%, reducing the annual downtime to just 315s.

In order to reach a five-nines uptime, we will work on:

  • Granular probing and health-checks
  • Advanced repositories performance monitoring and alerting
  • Gerrit limits and deadlines
  • RCAs
  • Multi-site improvements

Goal #3: Increase 1000x times the Gerrit replication performance

GerritForge has presented the innovating pull-replication plugin at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021, showing that it is possible to replicate Git commits and changes meta-data across the globe with msec latency. The pull-replication plugin technology and speed is going to be improved and made available and Open-Sourced to anyone and match and outperform the traditional replication plugin features.

Join the 2022 endeavor


We need YOU and the Gerrit community’s help and support in this 2022 endeavor.

GerritForge has already increased his Team of contributors working on the project, including three Gerrit maintainers and two Gerrit release managers. However, Gerrit’s success is in the cooperation, contribution, and ideas of the whole community of contributors, Gerrit admins, and users.

Let us know what you think about our goals. We are happy to cooperate and work with anyone sharing the same values and goals.

2022 is the year where Gerrit Code Review is pushed beyond its limits even further, making it the MOST innovative tool for large-scale repositories and teams worldwide.

Gerrit: 2021 in review

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Yet another year has passed for the Gerrit Code Review project with many challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, new exciting releases, and the most popular Gerrit User Summit with the largest audience ever in its 12 years of history.

2021 in numbers

  • 93 registered attendees to the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021, connecting from 56 companies over 17 countries, 14 talks showcased by 15 presenters over 2 days
  • 1 Gerrit Contributors’ Summit
  • 35 releases of which 2 major versions (v3.4.0 and v3.5.0.1) and 33 patches
  • 107 contributors from 32 organizations, merging 4763 changes to 84 projects

The Gerrit Code Review community has shown resiliency during these difficult times, with outstanding participation in the events organized during the year, all remote and lacking the much-needed face-to-face interaction.

  • Commits: -26%
  • Projects: -16%
  • Contributors: -30%
  • Companies: -41%
  • Average changes/contributor: +10%

The engagement has paid its toll after two years of pandemics with fewer organizations willing to invest time in contributing to Gerrit, possibly also impacted by the uncertainty of the future. 2021 has also been the first whole year of the project without David Pursehouse, one of the Gerrit project’s top #3 contributors. He was used to contributing 1.5k changes per year, which would alone easily justify the drop observed.

On the bright side, the contributors that continued over the year 2021 have shown an increased commitment as the number of active projects and commits has dropped less than the contributors, increasing the change/contributor rate compared to 2020.

Major organisations contributing to Gerrit in 2021

Google is confirmed to be the leading force of the Gerrit Code Review project, with over 62% of the changes merged, while GerritForge continues to be the #1 top contributor from the rest of the community. There are a couple of pleasant special surprises from the contributors.

  • Wikimedia Foundation confirmed to be the #2 top contributor from the community, all provided by Paladox who has been awarded Gerrit Maintainer in November.
  • SAP continues to be a strong contributor, just below Wikimedia Foundation, with Thomas being awarded Gerrit Maintainer in November.
  • Qualcomm is back on the shortlist of the top maintainers, with many new names in the list of contributors, well done!

Top-ten projects with major activity in 2021

  1. gerrit (2,903 changes)
  2. plugins/code-owners (447 changes)
  3. jgit (287 changes)
  4. plugins/task (83 changes)
  5. plugins/multi-site (57 changes)
  6. aws-gerrit (44 changes)
  7. modules/cache-chroniclemap (40 changes)
  8. plugins/checks (39 changes)
  9. plugins/high-availability (39 changes)
  10. plugins/replication (38 changes)

The first surprise is that the code-owners, the emerging star of the Gerrit plugins, received a massive investment of effort from Edwin (Google), who contributed 89% of the changes to it. The code-owners plugin has also been presented at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 and attracted the community’s attention.

The second surprise is the decline in contributions in the jgit project during the past two years: from 820 changes/year is now down to 374 changes in 2021.

Task is now the #2 plugin project in terms of merged changes in 2021. Qualcomm keeps the project’s full ownership with 98.9% of changes in 2021.

GerritForge confirm their commitment to improving Gerrit Multi-Site, as its plugin is the #3 in terms of changes merged in 2021.

Aws-gerrit is a relatively new project, presented less than two years ago and contributed by GerritForge, who contributed over 99% of the changes. It confirms to be a very active project that has helped the Gerrit Code Review open-source project deploy and test well-known “recipes” of infrastructure setups and see how Gerrit performs and works on those. Many bugs have been detected before the release and identified by the aws-gerrit project and CI integration.

The cache-chroniclemap module confirms to be very active in 2021, with 40 changes all provided by GerritForge. This relatively new module allows existing Gerrit setups to increase the overall performance of all persistent caches, which are vital in reducing the REST-API latency across all Gerrit features.

The checks plugin was deprecated back in 2020. However, it still shows significant changes and investment from Google in supporting the new Gerrit checks-API and UI. However, the rate of contributions is in stiff decline, down from the 324 changes in 2019 when it was still an actively developed project.

The last two plugins projects in the top tens are the replication and high-availability plugins, which has received major contributions from Qualcomm, GerritForge, Google and Ericsson.

Top events in 2021

The Gerrit Code Review community abandoned the idea of a face-to-face event in 2021 because of the continued global pandemic of COVID-19.
Instead, there were two separate virtual events for sharing the news of what is happening on the platform and the expectations from the community.

Virtual Gerrit Contributors’ Summit – 9th of June

The summit was organized by the Gerrit Community Managers and had an amazing audience amongst the contributors. The presentations showed what different teams are working on and reported into the summit notes:

Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 – 2-3 of December

It was the first experiment of an entirely Virtual User Summit of the Gerrit Code Review project history. The challenges were multiple, including the limitations of allowing up to 100s of attendees, shortening the overall time to 3h x 2 days, and still allowing some interactions between the audience and the presenters. After two years of silence, we have finally received some user stories of using Gerrit in the wild.

The Summit has received vast overall positive feedback and rated 7.9/10, making it a fantastic achievement. The quality and interest of the talks were scored even higher, reaching 8.2/10.

The talks have been fully recorded and published on the GerritForge TV channel:

It was definitely a lot of information and sharing, which showed that the Gerrit Code Review open-source project is alive and active more than ever.

Gerrit features highlights in 2021

Gerrit Code Review has major innovations developed and decisions made over 2021. See below a short recap of the ones that represent a turning point in the evolution of the Gerrit open-source project. Some of them are considered breaking changes and, therefore, need careful analysis and a planned upgrade path.

Speed up of Gerrit upgrade from v2.7 to the latest version

2021 has seen a significant increase in the cooperation and contributions of Qualcomm to the rest of the Gerrit Code Review community, focussed on the speed-up of the Gerrit upgrade process from v2.7 to v3.5.
The contributions and cooperation have brought many improvements to JGit and Gerrit and will allow many more companies to migrate faster and smoother than ever before.

Goodbye to Java 8

From Gerrit v3.5 onwards, the source code and binaries of Gerrit Code Review won’t be compatible with Java 8 anymore.

JSch SSH library is completed removed from Gerrit Code Review

The quirks and obsolescence of the JSch library has cursed Gerrit’s destiny for years. Thanks to Thomas Wolf (Paranor) JGit moved away from it and rebuilt all its Git/SSH stack on top of Apache Mina. That has allowed to remove the JSch library from the Gerrit dependencies and used the Apache Mina SSHD client stack instead.

ElasticSearch is removed from Gerrit Code Review

On the 2nd of February 2021, Elasticsearch B.V. changed its license model and abandoned the Apache 2.0 open-source license for the new versions of ElasticSearch v8 and over.

Gerrit cannot include or require any commercial product not released under one of the open-source licenses allowed by the project. The ElasticSearch backend has not been widely used in the community anyway, based on a recent survey sent to the community therefore the ESC decided on the 3rd of November that the ElasticSearch backend will be removed from Gerrit core and moved into a libModule.

Submit Requirements waving goodbye to Prolog

The Gerrit Code Review project does not use anymore Prolog rules for the submit rules of the project from the 16th of December. The support for Prolog-less submit rules is now mature and it will be part of the forthcoming v3.6 release in 2022.

What’s coming in 2022?

The future of Gerrit Code Review is bright and full of innovative ideas and improvements on the overall development and CI/CD lifecycle. With the forced remote working of millions of developers worldwide, more and more companies are looking on how to make remote interactions more useful and fruitful, reducing frictions and making the workflow smoother and faster more than ever.

Stay tuned and keep on using and contributing to Gerrit Code Review, one of the most innovative and productive platforms for code review and collaboration.

Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 – Summary and Survey Results

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The first Gerrit Virtual User Summit took place online on the 2nd and 3rd of December 2021.
If you have missed the Summit, all the presentations and content are online and is directly pointed by the details of the sessions from the main schedule.
All the recordings of the presentations and associated anonymized Q&A are accessible from GerritForge’s TV channel on YouTube.

The Virtual User Summit format and numbers

The Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 was held online to allow most of the community around the globe to attend and share their experience and ideas and avoid the problems with the traveling restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the limitations of the remote format, the interest and attendance to the Virtual User Summit has been outstanding, confirming the resiliency of the community and the will to inform and ask questions, share opinions and discuss no matter the difficulties and challenges.

See below some of the numbers of the Summit:

  • 92 registered attendees, with 71 of them showing up at at least one of the two dates (77% of attendance)
  • 17 countries connected (Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Ukraine, UK, USA)
  • 56 companies
  • 14 sessions in 2 days
  • 15 presenters

Despite the limitations of the remote interaction and the hours, this has been the largest User Summit ever, terrific news for the whole community.

What do people think about the Summit?

All the 71 attendees have received a Survey about the Summit, 24 of them have provided their feedback.

Q1: How would you rate the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 edition?
The average rating has been 7.9 over 10, with the 45% rating 9 to 10 points out of 10.

Q2: What was your main objective in attending the Summit?
Most responses were around “learning about Gerrit’s new features and initiatives” and “getting in touch with the community and its users”.

Q3: Do you consider to have achieved the objective?
88% of the people said “yes”, which seems consistent with the 7.9/10 overall rating of the Summit.

Q4: If your answer was “no”, what is the aspect that was not achieved?
All of them expressed concerns about the inability to have a two-way direct with the other users at the Summit, which is mainly linked to the technical difficulties and limitations of a remote webinar platform.

Q5: How satisfied are you with the quality of the presentations?
The average rating has been 8.2 over 10, with the 55% rating 9 to 10 points out of 10.

Q6: Would you prefer to have your camera on during the Summit as an attendee?
53% answered no, which shows that opinions are divided on the topic of having remote face-to-face communication with such a large audience.

Q7: Would you like to have breakout rooms to interact as part of the Summit?
76% answered yes, giving good confidence of trying that approach in the next Summit, assuming that would be “virtual” again.

Q8: What would be the best way for you to interact with other attendees and speakers during the Virtual Summit?
The majority of the answers were directed to the use of breakout rooms with a moderator, which matches the feedback given on Q7.

Q9: What platform would you suggest to deliver future Virtual Summits?
Most people did not express preferences, while others mentioned Zoom, Google Meet, and GoToWebinar (the one used during this 2021 Summit).

Q10: What did you like the most about the 2021 Summit, and what should be improved in the subsequent Summits?
Most of the people liked the content and quality of the presentations, which matches the high scores given in Q5. Also, the format of 3h per day, split into two different days, looks optimal for compatibility with the existing working day. Registration and attending the event were straightforward, and the browser-based integration with the stream of Q&A was easy.
The proposals for improvements were on the following points:

  • Having more talks about user stories: do people use topics? What they use for CI integration for them? How people vote on changes/topics?
  • Having direct interactions between participants, seeing their faces and talking to them directly
  • More communication and advertisement of the event beforehand
  • More seamless transition between the webinar part and the interactive Q&A session

What’s next for 2022?

With the new Omicron-variant of COVID-19 raging in the UK and the risk of global expansion in 2022, a face-to-face User Summit next year is still possible but unlikely.
The huge success of the Virtual Summit format could lead us to try an improved version in 2022, trying other platforms like Zoom or Google Meet.

Many new exciting features are coming in 2022, including the release of Gerrit v3.6 and the Prolog-less Submit Requirements. We would love to see again what the community thinks about it and interact more with the real-life Gerrit Code Review users and administrators.

Thanks again to those who have participated and presented at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021. See you next year for another exciting and more engaging get-together in 2022!

The Virtual Gerrit User Summit is tomorrow!

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Join the Gerrit Community tomorrow and Friday from 8 am PST for everything related to the Gerrit Code Review Community.

Gerrit provides web based code review and repository management for the Git version control system. Whether you are experienced or new to Gerrit, you should know that it provides a framework you and your teams can use to review code before it becomes part of the code base. Come and take this chance to join and learn about Gerrit Code Review.

Find here the full schedule of the sessions you will have access to.

Register and join the community event!

Few days left to the virtual Gerrit User Summit

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An important part of the summit are the lightning talks, ten-minute talks that intend to present research or demos and work in progress within the Gerrit Code Review.

Join Ian Gauthier, Flywheel.io who will present research performed to evaluate the extent to which historical data is an appropriate benchmark for reviewer recommendation systems. In another session Paul Jolly, CUE demonstrates how the CUE project uses GerritHub in combination with GitHub Actions for Continuous Integration and regression testing. And don’t miss out the live demo and presentation of the AWS-Gerrit project by Antonio Barone, GerritForge with the integration with AWS X-RAY, as part of the efforts to bring Gerrit to the cloud.

Find more details on the agenda and register here.

Be an active part of the Summit: Last Call for Presentations

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There are still a few slots open for you to present on the virtual Gerrit User Summit.

Submit your presentation proposal by creating a change to the Gerrit Summit 2021 repository by following these steps:

  • Login to https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com
  • Go to the Gerrit Summit 2021 repository
  • Click “CREATE CHANGE” button and specify the branch (master) and the headline of your talk
  • Click on “EDIT” button on the top-right to edit your change
  • Click on the “ADD/OPEN/UPLOAD” button and enter the filename for your talk (e.g. sessions/super-duper-repos.md for a talk or lightning-talks/mini-session.md for a lightning talk) upload the text for your talk by dragging the markdown text into the window.
  • Click the “PUBLISH EDIT” button on the top-right of the change screen
  • Click on the “MARK AS ACTIVE” button on the top-right of the change screen

Your talk will then be reviewed by the community and, when accepted, merged into the Gerrit User Summit 2021 site.

Don’t miss out!