Incentivizing Code Reviews and PR Testing

General Goals / Ideas

1. We need to find a way to encourage more reviewers from our large community of developers.  Lots of people doing a small number of tests/reviewers scales very well.
2. Document the incentives for people to do reviewers / functional testing.
3. Find a way to make the codebase easier to work with.  We've done some of this with Docker. But we should investigate ways to spin up DSpace in a temporary, virtual environment with minimal configuration/steps. This would allow anyone to more easily interact with & test individual PRs
4. Find a way to acknowledge code reviews / functional testing in Release Notes in the same way as development/code is acknowledged.

Resources to make Developers feel welcome

General Goal: Find a way to encourage other developers to get involved & help out in small ways

• New Developers Hub - Draft docs for new developers started by Hardy Pottinger 

Resources for making Code Reviews / Testing easier

General Goal: Find a way to make the codebase easier to work with & test PRs with.

• Testing DSpace 7 Pull Requests - How to use existing Docker scripts to spin up PRs more easily locally, in order to test them or review them.
• Spin up code in virtual environment (quickly) for easier reviews/testing
  • GitHub CodeSpaces: https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/overview
    • Tim Donohue has played with this, and it's possible to spin up DSpace 7 in CodeSpaces.  However, you need to use a 4 Core / 8GB RAM machine type (otherwise, the UI will often fail to build with an "error 137" - meaning it ran out of memory during the build process).  Connecting the UI to a running Backend is also not super-easy right now, as codespaces assigns a random URL.  We'd need to likely provide a Codespaces configuration for DSpace to make this easier.
    • May be a way to use our Docker scripts in CodeSpaces, but it's not easy yet. See https://notes.alexkehayias.com/running-docker-compose-in-codespaces/
  • GitPod: https://www.gitpod.io/for/opensource 
• Automated Code Reviewing resources.  Tools/resources exist which can do some automatic checking/verification of code quality in Pull Requests.  Some examples include:
  • Code Scanning in GitHub.  We already do some of this, but currently we only scan for security-oriented code issues.
    • Free & integrated into GitHub.  Interface is a bit clunky at times though.
    • Highly Configurable (e.g. see query types)
    • Could configure this to also check PR code quality against coding best practices (currently we only scan for major bugs / security issues).  See these settings
  • SonarCloud.io - This is a hosted version of SonarQube.
    • Free for open source projects. Integrates with GitHub & supports both Java and TypeScript. Can run on every new PR. 
    • Example projects: https://sonarcloud.io/explore/projects
    • Test analysis run by Tim on DSpace backend/frontend: https://sonarcloud.io/organizations/tdonohue/projects  (Keep in mind, there are definitely false positives listed here. These are just raw reports)
    • Pros: Highly Configurable Used by other major OS projects like Apache.  Good documentation/resources on how to fix any issues that are found. SonarQube is open source itself.
  • DeepSource
    • Free for open source projects. Integrates with GitHub & supports both Java and TypeScript. Can run on every new PR. 
    • Test analysis run by Tim on DSpace backend/frontend (Keep in mind, there are definitely false positives listed in both. These are just raw reports)
      • Backend: https://app.deepsource.com/gh/tdonohue/DSpace/
      • Frontend: https://app.deepsource.com/gh/tdonohue/dspace-angular/
    • Not as configurable, but able to turn off individual rules if they are too "noisy" or not useful.
    • Pros: Some "autofix" options. Good documentation/resources on how to fix any issues that are found.

Resources for acknowledging code reviewers / testers

General Goal: Find a way to acknowledge / track code reviewers so that we can more easily include them in Release Notes (and include this as a form of contribution for service providers).  Ideal is that it is either automated or semi-automated (e.g. a report that can be run regularly per release)

• All Contributors: https://github.com/all-contributors/all-contributors  
  • Great resource for acknowledging all types of contribution.  However, it'd be nice if we could find a way to do this per release  (i.e. in Release Notes) rather than just in general README.
• "Top Contributors" https://github.com/tdonohue/top-contributors
  • Old (unmaintained) project from Tim Donohue to try to highlight/acknowledge top reviewers/code contributors per month  using data from GitHub's API.
  • Old demo at https://tdonohue.github.io/top-contributors/
  • Maybe look at whether it's possible to adapt this to give similar stats per release?