💾 Archived View for gemini.bortzmeyer.org › rfc-mirror › rfc7735.txt captured on 2022-06-04 at 00:29:12.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R. Sparks Request for Comments: 7735 Oracle Category: Informational T. Kivinen ISSN: 2070-1721 INSIDE Secure January 2016 Tracking Reviews of Documents Abstract Several review teams ensure specific types of review are performed on Internet-Drafts as they progress towards becoming RFCs. The tools used by these teams to assign and track reviews would benefit from tighter integration to the Datatracker. This document discusses requirements for improving those tools without disrupting current work flows. Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7735. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Sparks & Kivinen Informational [Page 1] RFC 7735 Review Tracking January 2016 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Overview of Current Workflows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.1. Secretariat Focused . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.2. Review-Team Secretary Focused . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3.3. Reviewer Focused . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.4. Review Requester and Consumer Focused . . . . . . . . . . 10 3.5. Statistics Focused . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 5. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Appendix A. A Starting Point for Django Models Supporting the Review Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Appendix B. Suggested Features Deferred for Future Work . . . . 15 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 1. Introduction As Internet-Drafts are processed, reviews are requested from several review teams. For example, the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) and the Security Directorate (SecDir) perform reviews of documents that are in IETF Last Call. Gen-ART always performs a follow-up review when the document is scheduled for an IESG Telechat. SecDir usually performs a follow-up review, but the SecDir secretary may choose not to request that follow-up if any issues identified at Last Call are addressed and there are otherwise no major changes to the document. These teams also perform earlier reviews of documents on demand. There are several other teams that perform similar services, often focusing on specific areas of expertise. The secretaries of these teams manage a pool of volunteer reviewers. Documents are assigned to reviewers, taking various factors into account. For instance, a reviewer will not be assigned a document for which he is an author or shepherd. Reviewers are given a deadline, usually driven by the end of Last Call or an IESG Telechat date. The reviewer sends each completed review to the team's mailing list and to any other lists that are relevant for the document being reviewed. Often, a thread ensues on one or more of those lists to resolve any issues found in the review. The secretaries and reviewers from several teams are using a tool developed and maintained by Tero Kivinen. Much of its design predates the modern Datatracker. The application currently keeps its own data store and learns about documents needing review by inspecting Datatracker and tools.ietf.org pages. Most of those pages are easy to parse, but the Last Call pages, in particular, require Sparks & Kivinen Informational [Page 2] RFC 7735 Review Tracking January 2016 some effort. Tighter integration with the Datatracker would simplify the logic used to identify documents that are ready for review, make it simpler for the Datatracker to associate reviews with documents, and allow users to reuse their Datatracker credentials. It would also make it easier to detect other potential review-triggering events, such as a document entering Working Group (WG) Last Call or when an RFC's standard level is being changed without revising the RFC. Tero currently believes this integration is best achieved by a new implementation of the tool. This document captures requirements for that reimplementation, with a focus on the workflows that the new implementation must take care not to disrupt. It also discusses new features, including changes suggested for the existing tool at its issue tracker [art-trac]. For more information about the various review teams, see the following references. +-------------------------------+---------------------+ | General Area Review Team | [Gen-ART] [RFC6385] | | Security Directorate | [SecDir] | | Applications Area Directorate | [AppsDir] | | Operations Area Directorate | [OPS-dir] | | Routing Area Directorate | [RTG-dir] | | MIB Doctors | [MIBdoctors] | | YANG Doctors | [YANGdoctors] | +-------------------------------+---------------------+ 2. Overview of Current Workflows This section gives a high-level overview of how the review team secretaries and reviewers use the existing tool. It is not intended to be comprehensive documentation of how review teams operate. Please see the references for those details. For many teams, the team's secretary periodically (typically once a week) checks the tool for documents it has identified as ready for review. The tool compiles a list from Last Call announcements and IESG Telechat agendas. The secretary creates a set of assignments from this list and enters them into the reviewer pool, choosing the reviewers in roughly a round-robin order. That order can be perturbed by several factors. Reviewers have different levels of availability. Some are willing to review multiple documents a month. Others may only be willing to review a document every other month. The assignment process takes exceptional conditions such as reviewer vacations into account. Furthermore, secretaries are careful not to assign a document to a reviewer that is an author, shepherd, responsible WG chair, or has some other already existing association with the document. The preference is to get a reviewer with a fresh Sparks & Kivinen Informational [Page 3] RFC 7735 Review Tracking January 2016 perspective. The secretary may discover reasons to change assignments while going through the list of documents. In order to not cause a reviewer to make a false start on a review, the secretaries complete the full list of assignments before sending notifications to anyone. This assignment process can take several minutes and it is possible for new Last Calls to be issued while the secretary is making assignments. The secretary typically checks to see if new documents are ready for review just before issuing the assignments and updates the assignments if necessary. Some teams operate in more of a review-on-demand model. The Routing Area Directorate (RTG-dir), for example, primarily initiates reviews at the request of a Routing AD. They may also start an early review at the request of a WG chair. In either case, the reviewers are chosen manually from the pool of available reviewers driven by context rather than using a round-robin ordering. The issued assignments are either sent to the review team's email list or are emailed directly to the assigned reviewer. The assignments are reflected in the tool. For those teams handling different types of reviews (Last Call vs. Telechat, for example), the secretary typically processes the documents for each type of review separately, and potentially with different assignment criteria. In Gen-ART, for example, the Last Call reviewer for a document will almost always get the follow-up Telechat review assignment. Similarly, SecDir assigns any re-reviews of a document to the same reviewer. Other teams may choose to assign a different reviewer. Reviewers discover their assignments through email or by looking at their queue in the tool. The secretaries for some teams (such as the OPS-dir and RTG-dir) insulate their team members from using the tool directly. These reviewers only work through the review team's email list or through direct email. On teams that have the reviewers use the tool directly, most reviewers only check the tool when they see they have an assignment via the team's email list. A reviewer has the opportunity to reject the assignment for any reason. While the tool provides a way to reject assignments, reviewers typically use email to coordinate rejections with the team secretary. The secretary will find another volunteer for any rejected assignments. The reviewer can indicate that the assignment is accepted in the tool before starting the review, but this feature is rarely used. The reviewer sends a completed review to the team's email list or secretary, as well as any other lists relevant to the review, and usually the draft's primary email alias. For instance, many Last Call reviews are also sent to the IETF general list. The teams typically have a template format for the review. Those templates usually start with a summary of the conclusion of the review. Sparks & Kivinen Informational [Page 4] RFC 7735 Review Tracking January 2016 Typical summaries are "ready for publication" or "on the right track but has open issues". The reviewer (or in the case of teams that insulate their reviewers, the secretary) uses the tool to indicate that the review is complete, provides the summary, and has an opportunity to provide a link to the review in the archives. Note, however, that having to wait for the document to appear in the archive to know the link to paste into the tool is a significant enough impedance that this link is often not provided by the reviewer. The SecDir secretary manually collects these links from the team's email list and adds them to the tool. Occasionally, a document is revised between when a review assignment is made and when the reviewer starts the review. Different teams can have different policies about whether the reviewer should review the assigned version or the current version. 3. Requirements 3.1. Secretariat Focused o The Secretariat must be able to configure secretaries and reviewers for review teams (by managing Role records). o The Secretariat must be able to perform any secretary action on behalf of a review team secretary (and thus, must be able to perform any reviewer action on behalf of the reviewer). 3.2. Review-Team Secretary Focused o A secretary must be able to see what documents are ready for a review of a given type (such as a Last Call review). o A secretary must be able to assign reviews for documents that may not have been automatically identified as ready for a review of a given type. (In addition to being the primary assignment method for teams that only initiate reviews on demand, this allows the secretary to work around errors and handle special cases, including early review requests.) o A secretary must be able to work on and issue a set of assignments as an atomic unit. No assignment should be issued until the secretary declares the set of assignments complete. o The tool must support teams that have multiple secretaries. The tool should warn secretaries that are simultaneously working on assignments and protect against conflicting assignments being made. Sparks & Kivinen Informational [Page 5] RFC 7735 Review Tracking January 2016 o It must be easy for the secretary to discover that more documents have become ready for review while working on an assignment set. o The tool should make preparing the assignment email to the team's email list easy. For instance, the tool could prepare the message, give the secretary an opportunity to edit it, and handle sending it to the team's email list. o It must be possible for a secretary to indicate that the review team will not provide a review for a document (or a given version of a document). This indication should be taken into account when presenting the documents that are ready for a review of a given type. This will also make it possible to show on a document's page that no review is expected from this team. o A secretary must be able to easily see who the next available reviewers are, in order. o A secretary must be able to edit a reviewer's availability, both in terms of frequency, not-available-until-date, and skip-next- n-assignments. (See the description of these settings in Section 3.3.) o The tool should make it easy for the secretary to see any team members that have requested to review a given document when it becomes available for review. o The tool should make it easy for the secretary to identify that a reviewer is already involved with a document. The current tool allows the secretary to provide a regular expression to match against the document name. If the expression matches, the document is not available for assignment to this reviewer. For example, Tero will not be assigned documents matching '^draft- (kivinen|ietf-tcpinc)-.*