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gnolang · May 9, 2024 · 1b3280c · 1b3280c
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diff --git a/docs/engineering/conventions/pr-reviewing.md b/docs/engineering/conventions/pr-reviewing.md
@@ -25,3 +25,30 @@ A few tips to review effectively:
     - Other reviewers might have your same doubts. It's good if the answers you're given are as such out for everyone to see.
     - Documentation and tests are also good places to put long-term information!
 - [Humanizing Reviews](https://www.processimpact.com/articles/humanizing_reviews.pdf) is a nice read.
+
+## Preparing the review meeting
+
+Weekly, we hold a ["GitHub review meeting"](https://github.com/gnolang/meetings/issues/18).
+The meeting serves as a synchronous space to unblock development of key Pull
+Requests, especially those which need consensus from the team to move forward
+or a "philosophical check-in" to ensure the PR is aligned with the intended
+direction of the project. (ie., assess whether the changes are OK with Jae or
+other stakeholders.)
+
+The agenda of the review meeting is prepared by adding a PR to the ["Review
+Meeting"](https://github.com/orgs/gnolang/projects/4/views/1) project, in the
+"Agenda" column. Anyone can add PRs to this agenda. Who is in charge of [leading
+the review meeting](./pr-triage.md) should proceed to prioritise the agenda:
+
+- PRs which need quick rounds of consensus from the core team can be tackled
+	first; mostly if it is expected that any arising discussions will take less
+	than 5 minutes.
+- PRs which need "longer" conversations should be tackled next; but prioritising
+	those that are felt as the most pressing and urgent issues, either because
+	of a pending deadline or because they're blocking other, significant work.
+
+The point of the meeting is not necessarily to merge PRs, but rather to unblock
+further work. The meeting focuses more strictly on PRs to ensure that whatever
+we're talking about has already a real, practical code-implementation; for any
+general questions about whether an issue should be tackled or not, the Monday
+weekly sync is a better place.
diff --git a/docs/engineering/conventions/pr-triage.md b/docs/engineering/conventions/pr-triage.md
@@ -29,62 +29,23 @@
     - **Make a first PR review**, as in-depth as you can but deferring where you lack the expertise.
         - If the PR lacks context, needs more explanation to understand what it's doing, lacks tests or documentation, **feel free to request it and defer reviewing to after that is done.**
         - The objective here is to ensure the PR doesn't have any major problems and can be handed off for finer-grained review by a codeowner.
-        - Defer reviews on Draft PRs, unless the author has specifically requested an initial review (but be broad, in these cases).
+        - Defer reviews on Draft PRs, unless the author has specifically requested an initial review (but be broad, in these reviews; no need to be specific if the code is not finalised).
     - For ready PRs, add any review requests which are not already requested by CODEOWNERS.
     - Place the PR in the correct column in the Pull Requests board.
     - _Prioritise community pull requests,_ because they are not paid they lose interest 10x faster.
     - **Prioritise this part of the process over any software development for the duration of the triage week.**
 - Prepare the agenda for the review meeting
-    - The review meeting has the primary purpose of acting upon the following kind of PRs:
-        - Those that need a "philosophical", collective or executive decision in order to move forward.
-        - Those that can be easily unblocked by the meeting (ie. gathering knowledge / checking with the team nothing has been missed)
-    - Before the GitHub review meeting, work through the PRs you've discussed and viewed this week, both incoming and the ones in the backlog.
-    - Add them to the "Review Meeting" column on GitHub and re-order them to make sure that the most important ones are at the top.
-        - This serves as the "agenda" for the meeting; anyone can add items, but it is your responsibility to ensure to prioritize them. (If you're up to speed on most PRs, this can take as little as 15 minutes, before the call)
+	- See the adjacent [Reviewing PRs](./pr-reviewing.md) document for some indications on how to best prepare and structure the review meeting.
+    - Before the GitHub review meeting, work through the PRs you've discussed and viewed this week.
+    - Add them to the "Agenda" column on GitHub and re-order them to make sure that the most important ones are at the top.
+        - On the agenda, anyone can add items, but it is your responsibility to ensure to prioritize them. (If you're up to speed on most PRs, this can take as little as 15 minutes, before the call)
     - Make sure to know the context for the PRs in the review column, so that you can briefly introduce the changes via voice before kicking off its discussion.
-	- Morgan and Nemanja are available as alternative leads if neither is comfortable with leading it. However, preparing the agenda and being available to give context on the discussed PRs is still the responsibility of those on rotation. (TODO)
-	- TODO: Move general rules on how to prepare the agenda for the review meeting to pr-reviewing.md
-- Use the Core Team board to see the status on other PRs and ongoing work,
-	coordinate with Nemanja on which ones to ask for status updates (TODO).
-
-### A typical week
-
-Use this as a practical example of how things could work. This is not authoritative and meant as an example to organise the week and triaging work with your colleague :)
-
-<details><summary>It is very long, so it's collapsed</summary>
-
-TODO: Update this with the amended parts of the process, make it less verbose.
-
-- **The friday before the triage week**, Alice and Bob message each other, deciding on mansions:
-    - Alice will read through the incoming PRs, and judge what she can review and send to Bob what he should review. She will also ping the team members on Monday for any pending reviews for the previous week.
-    - Bob will read through the backlog of existing PRs, check out what needs love and care and send to Alice what she should review. He will also be drafting the new round of PR suggestions to be sent off on Thursday.
-- **Monday**
-    - Bob kicks off in the morning with his coffee and reading through some of the current open PRs in the backlog. To his surprise, he founds some that have been opened 3 months earlier and have gotten no response yet. He finds a relatively small one involving a new feature on the `gnokey` client, and one on a refactoring of the GnoVM test suite; he sends off the `gnokey` one to Alice, as she generally has good taste for command-line UX and clients, and takes on the refactoring for the day.
-    - Alice goes through the `gnokey` PR, and after checking it through, she posts some comments but otherwise looks good to her. She approves it. The changes require a bit of attention from its codeowners as they change the CLI design, so makes a comment on the PR pinging them.
-    - Just ahead of the weekly, Alice sends off DMs to three team members which have pending reviews from the previous week's batch, going through the posted PRs of the previous week and checking which ones were reviewed.
-    - Bob finishes going through the refactor and notices several areas which could be improved with additional comments, and requests the author to add a bit more context to the reasons.
-- **Tuesday**
-    - Overnight, a new PR came up from an overeseas team member, which adds a new endpoint to the Tendermint2 RPC node. Alice sees it and decides to take care of it.
-    - While going through the backlog, Bob notices there's a PR by a community member where Carl and James commented, disagreeing on how the PR author should fix it, which has been awaiting Carl's reply for a while. He pings Carl to take another look, and pre-emptively places it in the "Review Meeting" column in case Carl doesn't manage to get around to it before Thursday.
-    - The Tendermint2 PR looks good. She sends it off to Bob so he can take a second look. Bob takes a look at it. It's good to go, and merges it!
-    - In the afternoon, two new PRs come through, one is a typo fix on the docs, and the other one is a GnoVM bugfix. Alice goes through the typo fix and immediately approves and merges it, while the GnoVM bugfix seems a little bit more complex to go through. Being currently doing other work, she sends it off to Bob.
-- **Wednesday**
-    - Bob had some trouble going through the GnoVM bugfix. He asks for a bit of context, but cross-checks with Alice to see what she thinks of it. Alice seems to have a clearer picture, and requests a few changes while also answering some of Bob's clarification requests.
-    - A couple PRs were made by a team member fixing some text on the r/demo/boards and r/demo/microblog realms, and a draft PR was made by an external contributor that proposes some changes to the VM keeper (sdk/vm).
-    - Alice hands off the small fixes to Bob, to take a look at the sdk/vm PR. The changes look a bit tricky, and not necessarily beneficial. She makes a comment thanking the contributor, and pinging the relative codeowner for an opinion on how to proceed. She adds some labels, and places it in the "Review meeting" column pre-emptively.
-    - The testing suite refactor from monday has had fixes applied by the author. Bob sees the notification, asks Alice to take a second look. It's now good. Merged!
-- **Thursday**
-    - Alice sees a new PR adding a new `p/` package. It looks good to her,  but it's  probably best if James takes a second look.
-    - Bob goes through more backlog in the morning. There are 3 PRs that have been awaiting feedback by Jae. One of them is by an external contributor -- he comments that the PR will be reviewed later in the day. He adds the three of them to the review meeting column.
-    - Bob fills out an initial draft list of PRs that he's seen in the past week. He has some blanks on some team members, but sends it off to Alice to see what she has to add.
-    - Sure enough, Alice adds the `p/` package PR, and some more that she thinks need some love. They post it on the meetings repository and send off a message on Slack and Signal.
-    - An hour before the call, Alice and Bob huddle together to figure out how to prioritize the review meeting. The PRs by outside contributors pending collective decisions are pushed to the top, and they ping some team members to clarify why they added their PRs so they can prioritize accordingly.
-    - The review meeting: Alice does the screensharing, Bob does the talking and writing (on the meeting minutes). All in all, a productive one: managed to go through 6 PRs, and merge 3 of them!
-- **Friday**
-    - It has been a long week. A couple PRs rolled in from an Asian partner; Alice sends one to Bob and reviews the other. They are still in draft, so they do mostly a preliminary review, and make sure to understand what the partners are trying to accomplish.
-    - Aside from that, Alice and Bob spend the rest of the day writing some good ol' code, and looking forward to the weekend.
-
-</details>
+	- Morgan and Nemanja are available as alternative leads if neither of the tragers is comfortable with leading it. However, preparing the agenda and being available to give context on the discussed PRs is still the responsibility of those on rotation.
+- Push development of existing PRs along
+	- There are often important PRs which are blocked for weeks awaiting reviews or feedback from the existing reviewers.
+	- Use the Core Team board to see the status on other PRs and ongoing work, coordinate with Nemanja on which ones to ask for status updates.
+	- Use our main internal communication channels (Signal Gno-Tech-Staff; Slack #gno-core-tech) to publicly ping team members on what should be tackled.
+	- If the team members are lagging behind on providing status update, please go ahead and ask status updates individually
 
 ### Planning the rotation
 
@@ -96,32 +57,24 @@ TODO: Update this with the amended parts of the process, make it less verbose.
 
 ## Tools
 
-There are a good amount of existing tools you can use to oversee incoming PRs.
+There are some existing tools you can use to oversee incoming PRs.
 
-- The [**Pull Requests**](https://github.com/orgs/gnolang/projects/4) board is a good default that should work as a baseline tool for most.
-    - [The "Triage" view](https://github.com/orgs/gnolang/projects/4/views/2) on the Pull Requests board is probably the best starting point for performing reviews.
-    - Unfortunately it has no options for "last updated" of "created". GitHub PR/issue search can be a good substitute.
 - Setting up notifications (and making sure they are always enabled for participating conversations)
     - Some prefer the GitHub UI, some emails. GitHub has fine-grained settings you can [set up](https://github.com/settings/notifications) (Custom Routing is a useful feature if you use emails).
     - Enabling notifications can help you be up-to-speed with any replies being posted on your triage week.
 - GitHub PR/Issue search sorting
     - There are some good sorting filters when looking at the [pull requests tab on GitHub](https://github.com/gnolang/gno/pulls)
+	- The default view is a good option to see newly created PRs.
     - You can use "Least recently updated" to see the most "stale" conversations on the repostory.
     - But "recently updated" too can be effective as well, to see what PRs have been updated and can likely move forward.
     - You can use the `-is:draft` query to filter out draft PRs.
 - Make sure to communicate regularly with your co-triager. Suggestions:
     - Check out the above example for an example of a "workflow" with your co-triager.
     - If you need a hand figuring out the agenda for the review meeting, ping Morgan.
 
-### Actions
-
-- Start an initial cycle to experiment with this process and improve it \
-	@kouteki
-- Set up Monocle for stats tracking on the effectiveness on the process \
-	@thehowl
-- Change "Pull Requests" Project to "Review Meeting" Project, remove automations
-	and only add PRs to be discussed in the meeting. \
-	@kouteki
+Unfortunately, at the time of writing, no tool properly encapsulates a feed for
+the "incoming PRs" (= new ready PR, or moved from draft to ready). Eventually,
+we'll develop one and this section will be updated.
 
 ### TODO: Stats