Tag Archives: user summit

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.

Gerrit User Summit is calling: submit your presentation

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The Gerrit Code Review community invites you to participate at the virtual Gerrit User Summit 2021 scheduled to take place online on the 2nd and 3rd December, from 8 am to 11 am PST.

This year’s program will offer a keynote, six presentation sessions and seven ‘lightning’ (10-minute) talks distributed in two days, so that you can share your ideas, research, demonstrations, live demos, and network with the Gerrit Community and those interested in learning and adopting Gerrit Code Review in their development process.

Submit your presentation proposal by creating a change to the Gerrit Summit 2021 repository by following those 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.

Gerrit User Summit 2017, 2-3 Oct, London

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New and exciting features are coming for this year Gerrit User Summit, with the launch of Ver. 2.15, NoteDb, high-availability, multi-master and much more.

The Summit will take place for the very first time in Europe, London, the location chosen by the community after a public consultation, the 2nd and 3rd of October at CodeNode (Skills Matter).

There are still a few places available but hurry up and register now at https://gerritusersummit.eventbrite.com.

See below an overview of the topics that will be presented and discussed during the User Summit.

What’s new in Gerrit 2.14.x.

Gerrit v2.14 was released during the last Hackathon in April and has gone through three patch releases. David Pursehouse from CollabNet will give an overview of the new features introduced which would be highly beneficial for all of those who haven’t migrated yet.

Gerrit at Google: Multi-master, Mutli-tenant.

Google is the founder, main contributor and possibly the most advanced user of the Gerrit Code Review: learning from their experience is a unique opportunity to learn and being able to leverage and use the tool at its best.

Patrick Hiesel from Google will go through the insights of their Gerrit Code Review architecture and will provide some of their metrics of scale. In addition to that, he will present some findings from the recent switch of their load-balancing infrastructure and the associated pitfalls encountered.

Google is possibly the only one in the world using Gerrit in a multi-tenant setup, having a unique multi-master installation that serves a constellation of domains and projects, including huge and familiar ones like Android and Chromium.

Standing “on the shoulders of giants” like Google helps a lot in preventing scalability issues as the audience and adoption of Gerrit Code Review grows in large companies: being part of the audience in the talk is a unique opportunity to learn and ask questions directly to the maintainers of their infrastructure.

PolyGerrit: a new UX experience for Gerrit Code Review

Google has invested a lot in reinventing and reengineering the user interface of Gerrit Code Review, which remained mostly unchanged for almost a decade. A new team has been put together in their San Francisco offices with experienced UX developers that leveraged the new Polymer framework of web components.

The result is PolyGerrit, a modern web UX which provides an unprecedented browsing speed and flexible rendering across different devices, including mobile and tablets.

The PolyGerrit Team will be presenting the findings of their user-experience research and show some of the features and insights of the new UX.

Gerrit CI and keeping logs forever.

Gerrit Code Review itself is a large project, involving over 300 developers across the globe and using the most advanced DevOps practices. The CI/CD pipeline has been provided and managed by GerritForge on the https://gerrit-ci.gerritforge.com and Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will present the latest improvements in the pipeline plus an interesting way of collecting and reusing the logs.

Leveraging the logs for identifying the bottlenecks of the CI/CD pipeline is the way to drive improvement. GerritForge leveraged the expertise of his engineers to harvest and organize data and will give it back to the community as powerful dashboards.

Beyond Gerrit.

Gerrit is great. However, it is also quite an important part of a bigger ALM process. Jacek Centkowski from CollabNet will describe how multiple tools can be unified under a single TeamForge umbrella and what are the immediate benefits of it.

What’s coming in Gerrit 2.15

After only four months, we are already close to the v2.15 of Gerrit Code Review, which would be possibly the last one before the step to the v3.0.

Dave Borowitz from Google, principal maintainer of the Gerrit Code Review project, will go through the new features of v2.15 and possibly give a glimpse in what to expect from v3.0.

Mining Gerrit Data to Study Contentious Reviews and Community Evolution

Gerrit Code Review is much more than a tool, it is a way for people working together in companies that are large and mostly distributed across the globe.

Shane McIntosh from McGill University has been running a research lab on this topic. The Software REBELs—a research lab at McGill University—mine code review data to study topics like the impact that code review practices have on software release and design quality. Our more recent work mines code review data to study the reviewing process itself. In this talk, I will describe the results of two empirical studies of data that we collected from the Gerrit instances of the OpenStack project. The first study aims to understand the reviews where reviewers disagree about a patch. The second study follows how the concerns that reviewers raise evolve as the OpenStack community ages and individual reviews accrue experience.

Gerrit Analytics: dashboards, networks, KPI

Gerrit has always been lacking major code analytics features compared to other Git Server tools like GitBlit or GitLab. GerritForge Ltd is filling the gap and adds one important asset to the Gerrit Code Review platform: code review analytics.

We need to harvest and unify the logs and events coming from the different components of the CI/CD pipeline by putting at the center of it the people and teams that are building and discussing the code on Gerrit. The resulting data-lake of information can be later analyzed and correlated to calculate the cycle time of the entire pipeline.

Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will show the new analytics dashboards that are going to be published and provided back to the Team that is developing the Gerrit Code Review project as a precious contribution to the community.

How to extend Gerrit using Scripting Plugins

Gerrit Code Review has a robust set of API that can be used to extend its functionalities and provide a more integrated development workflow for the Teams.

Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will present how to use different scripting tools to extend the capabilities of Gerrit without the need of developing and building a plugin, using Jython, Groovy and Scala.

A new simpler but powerful Gerrit Jenkins plugin

Gerrit Code Review is an essential part of a larger CI/CD pipeline. Most of the times it is used in conjunction with Jenkins, the most popular OpenSource Continuous Integration and Delivery tool.

The integration between Gerrit and Jenkins (Gerrit Trigger Plugin) was developed back in 2010 at Sony and since then has been extended and adopted in thousands of Jenkins installations. However, Jenkins has evolved too and has now a brand new concept and definition of multi-branch pipeline which struggles to be seamlessly integrated with the current Gerrit Trigger Plugin.

Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will present a brand new plugin based on the new Jenkins branch discovery API which works seamlessly with Jenkins multi-branch pipelines and provides a simpler interface with Gerrit by leveraging the new WebHooks.

Diffy with enterprise grade

Since 2012 CollabNet has been working on improving Gerrit integration with TeamForge. Many features have been created to satisfy the needs of enterprise customers. Eryk Szymanski from CollabNet will present features like RBAC, history protection, Git style notifications, quality gates, pull request and code browser which have been implemented on top of vanilla Gerrit.

Q&A with the maintainers

Have you ever wondered why something is working in a certain way? Have you ever wanted to explain any complaint about some parts of Gerrit? Would you give your congratulation to the people that made this project? Would you like to make a feature request or propose new ideas?

This is the moment where you can speak directly face-to-face to the people that are building this project every single day, the Gerrit maintainers.

The event is free for everyone, thanks to the contribution of our sponsors, CollabNet Inc, GerritForge Ltd and Skills Matter Ltd.

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Gerrit User Summit & Hackathon 2015

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Gerrit User Summit at Google Mountain View – CA

Gerrit user Summit 2015

Exciting times this year at the Gerrit User Summit and Hackathon 2015: the major contributors and players of the Gerrit community shared experiencing, opinions and news in an intense 7-days event in Google – Mountain View – CA.

The User Summit

The first two days have seen the User Summit at the centre of the stage: scalability, scalability and scalability have been the Leitmotif of the discussion.
GerritHub.io started the saga with the astonishing numbers of the two years growth:

  • 6.5K users (+580%)
  • 41K changes (+1700%)
  • 16K projects (+530%)
  • 500GBytes (+500%)

The two years of live production experience with users coming from GitHub have highlighted problems (replication, repositories sharding, multi-master) and possible solutions, ranging from Gerrit Virtual Private Hosting to the on-premises deployment integrated with BitBucket and GitHub:Enterprise.
Ericsson continued with a very detailed description of how Gerrit is used as “Enterprise Washing Machine” of all code that goes through the development pipeline: scalability and control are the fundamental keywords that were repeatedly mentioned and enforced.
The replication across sites have been massively improved regarding performance and stability since the introduction of Git/HTTPS as the main protocol for replication, as previously advised by GerritForge in 2014.
The first day ended with Google smashing out everyone his hypersonic numbers:

  • 1.6M changes / 3.8M patch-sets
  • 240 Gerrit virtual nodes
  • 2.5M repositories

The second day was all projected on the future of Gerrit, with three very interesting features coming soon.

Gerrit 3.0 and NoteDB

Dave Borowitz presented the status of the replacement of Gerrit DBMS
with a 100% open standard solution based on commit notes, implemented by all OpenSource and Commercial “flavours” of Git. The solution will allow interoperability with other code-review implementations (e.g. Phabricator) and fully enable reviews replication and off-line operations.
The new DBMS-free version of Gerrit will be called the Ver. 3.0 and it will be the next version after current Gerrit master (Ver. 2.13) gets released. released.

Gerrit PluginManager: one plugin to rule them all

Luca Milanesio presented a new vision on how to discover and install plugins on the Gerrit platform: Gerrit PluginManager. We should not bundle more and more plugins with Gerrit, which eventually would lead to an explosion of the WAR file-size. You can now install only a “plugin-manager” which then guide you through the “one-click” set-up of all the others.
Differently from similar solutions such as Jenkins Update Centre, the Gerrit PluginManager is based on the live status of the plugins and their compatibility with Gerrit: as soon as one plugin gets patched and successfully compiled with a version of Gerrit, it will automatically be listed and made available by the PluginManager. Additionally GerritForge will provide a list of certified and guaranteed plugins that have been successfully tested with Gerrit.

PolyGerrit, the new web-component UX for Gerrit.

Andrew Bonventre is the Googler that is driving the transformation of Gerrit UX to the new Polymer platform, however for personal reasons he was not able to attend the Summit. Dave Borowitz replaced him and unveiled that will be the (very) near future of Gerrit UX: no more GWT and complex and black magic transforming Java in obscure JavaScript, the future is coming through web-components, a new emerging and promising standard for the HTML and modern web-browsers.
Despite the UX being at very early stages, Dave was able to showcase a fully functional list of changes and search box powered by Polymer and calling Gerrit REST-API, really fast and promising!

Gertty, the text-only Gerrit Code Review.

On the complete opposite side, why not using Gerrit from an 80×25 text-only console? Gertty is an astonishing 100% char-based console, all based on Gerrit REST-Api and a local SqLite local DB for caching changes. Allows complete off-line operations and synchronisation with Gerrit changes. Productive and effective while you are on the go.

CollabNet and Gerrit tuning cheat-sheet

CollabNet presented a useful four pages brochure to guide through the tuning of a Gerrit set-up for a small, medium or large installation. Based on their experience of running TeamForge SCM, the commercial fork of Gerrit Code Review based on their existing TeamForge ALM proprietary solution, they have been able to experiment the Gerrit default settings and learn how to adjust them to leverage the full power of your setup.
The audience appreciated the effort and encouraged CollabNet to post all the findings as Gerrit reviews to get the code-base better and improve the default settings of the set-up.

Gerrit and Jenkins Workflow dance together with Docker.

Cloudbees presented a very effective demo on how to use Gerrit and Jenkins Workflow plugin to implement a real-life Continuous Delivery Pipeline. The presentation leveraged the use of Docker images as previously presented by Stefano Galarraga in his “Gerrit and Jenkins Continuous Delivery Pipeline for BigData” talk. They both explained and showed how Code Review is key in implementing a successful and smooth code validation and roll-out. Stefano’s presentation made use of the new exciting feature of “topic submission” that enables the grouping and commit of multiple changes across repositories.

The Hackathon, topics and improvements.

Gerrit Hackathon 2015

A lot of code have been pushed during the hackathon:

  • 400 changes merged
  • 3 Gerrit version released

Gerrit metrics

Surely the hot-topic of the hackathon has been the introduction of a new pluggable metrics engine in Gerrit, currently half-merged in master branch. Gustaf demoed on how now is possible to use standard tools such as Graphite and JMX console to extract, display and graph the most relevant Gerrit metrics in real-time. This is similar to what the JavaMelody plugin was providing, with the added value of getting the data outside the Gerrit JVM and analyse with greater detail and a standard monitoring platform.

PolyGerrit

Gerrit master has been officially upgraded to allow the development of the new Polymer-based UX for Gerrit, code-named “PolyGerrit”. Gerrit master will need from now on the installation of NodeJS during development. This is needed for building and packaging the “vulcanised” version of Gerrit UX which contains the basic components of the user interface. At the moment the only thing that will be visible is the demo of list of changes presented by Dave Borowitz at the User Summit, however new changes are coming over and Google announced that they are targeting Q4-2015 for a first internal release of the new UX.

GerritForge CI Verifier

As Gerrit 3.0 will be completely revamped in terms of reviews persistence, the community pushed for having a stricter changes validation on both the old DBMS and new NoteDB based persistence. GerritForge extended the use of the CI system (https://gerrit-ci.gerritforge.com) to cover the validation of every change / patch-set that will be uploaded to Gerrit from now on. This is a substantial improvement on the Code Review workflow of Gerrit itself and will hopefully contribute to a stable and solid Ver. 3.0 release next year.

Externalisation of Gerrit Hooks and Events to plugins

Qualcomm worked at completing the externalisation of Gerrit hooks and stream events into plugins. This change will allow to plug different events providers depending on the type of Gerrit set-up, single node or multi-master. One more important step towards an OpenSource implementation of Gerrit Multi-Master.