John Fletcher wrote:
I would like to second the suggestion of trainee review managers. Perhaps that could be on a smaller library, not less important, but less in scope to look at.
John Fletcher
Jarrad Waterloo wrote:
There is a [mis]conception that using boost is easy but contributing to boost is hard. I am not sure if there is any truth to it or not. I would like to be a review manager but I don't know all that is involved / required. Worse still I don't how! I have similar problems with contributing code. Is there any good tutorials out there and maybe boost should consider apprenticeships where there may be multiple review managers; an experienced one training an inexperienced one. Anyway to make this process, transfer of experience, as easy as possible and your shortage of review managers could be a thing of the past.
As Jake mentions in another post, one natural place to go for description and assistance is the Review Wizards. In my experience, they are very pleasant and helpful. Another easy source is the documentation of the role at the boost website. However, even after this, you may want another point of view. I'll happily volunteer to share my experiences with anyone who thinks they would be helpful. My first suggestion is that you participate in a review as a reviewer (if you haven't already) and try to follow the complete review discussion of the library closely. Identify which issues are important and which are secondary. Are there any show stoppers? How does the library author respond to constructive criticism? Are any of the reviewers resorting to non-constructive criticism? How could you sum up the issues in this review? Is the opinion of the reviewers positive, neutral or negative? A look at my review reports compared to some others will show that I am, if anything, over complete in my summations of the reviews. This is intentional on my part, as I like to have a single post to look through to understand the flow of the review and the issues raised for the library. However, it is not required. Some fine reviews have been summed up in far less text. Once you have participated a couple of times, and you understand the process you are ready to try managing. Always try to pick reviews where you understand the basic issues involved. For example, if you have never tried meta-programming, a library that uses metaprogramming to provide much of its functionality is probably not a good idea for you to manage. No one in boost is an expert in everything (though some people are very impressively broad), and the review manager needs to know enough about the topic to understand the plusses and minuses of the points that are discussed during the review. If need be, don't feel bad about checking a couple of references for some details, but know the topic well enough to read the references closely. For the review, and the week or so following set aside some time. Managing a review is no where near as time consuming as submitting a library, but it does take up some time. It will be far less of an issue if you budget for the time before you start. An active review may produce a few hundred posts with a wealth of details, so reading them closely enough to make an informed decision is time consuming. I hope that helps, and feel free to ask me (and everyone else on the list who wants to help) whatever questions come to mind. John