Hello all,

As the trustedfirmware.org project maintenance process [1] is now live, it would be good if we start adopting it in our development flow for TF-A.

I would like to highlight the main changes that will have an impact on our day-to-day work on the project.

1. Patch submitters to explicit choose their reviewers ------------------------------------------------------

All patches should now have dedicated reviewers. The patch submitter is responsible for adding them in the reviewers field of their Gerrit review.

Each patch should have 2 types of reviewers: - Code owners. - Maintainers.

There needs to be 1 code owner per module modified by the patch as well as 1 maintainer.

The maintainers and code owners are listed here:

https://trustedfirmware-a.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about/maintainers.html

Ideally, we would have at least 2 code owners per module so that they can review each other's patches. Unfortunately we're not there yet (especially for platform ports) so we need a work around for patches submitted by the sole code owner of a module itself.

In this scenario, I would like to suggest we leave it to the patch submitter to decide on a case by case basis whether they want to nominate someone to do the detailed technical review or skip it entirely. In any case, a maintainer will still need to review and approve the patch.

If this proves not to be working well over time (either because it creates unnecessary review bottlenecks or lowers the code quality too much), we can revisit that in the future.

If you've got patches in review right now, may I please request you to add reviewers accordingly? The sooner we start adopting this process the better, as it will allow us to see how this works in practice and come up with adjustments if need be.

2. Reviewers to provide feedback in a timely manner ---------------------------------------------------

If someone asks you to do a review, please try to do it in a timely manner. There is no timeline guidelines set just yet for TF-A but I think a good rule of thumb would be to aim to provide feedback in a week's time. This does not mean that the review has to be completed in a week (complex patches might need a lot of discussion and/or rounds of review & rework), just that there's some progress and activity at least once per week.

If for some reason, you know you won't be able to honour a review request, please say so on Gerrit ASAP so that the patch submitter can choose another reviewer.

3. What's next? ---------------

In the coming weeks or months, we'd like to:

- Extend the list of code owners.

- Extend the list of maintainers.

- Come up with TF-A specific contribution guidelines that complement the tf.org process [1]. We already have some here [2] but would like to expand them and possibly revisit some of them. Obviously, this will be a community effort, much like the tf.org process was, and all TF-A contributors will have a say in defining this so that we end up with something that works for everyone (as much as possible).

Best regards, Sandrine

[1] https://developer.trustedfirmware.org/w/collaboration/project-maintenance-pr...

[2] https://trustedfirmware-a.readthedocs.io/en/latest/process/contributing.html