Dhruv Srivastava, Google

@dhruvsri

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Cleaner Gerrit

Motivation

Prior feedback that Gerrit is clunky and hard-to-navigate.

Remove rarely used / unused features that take up valuable real estate and are always shown to the users.

Process

Find daily usage of feature.

Add tracking if necessary. Gerrit already tracks all button clicks currently.

Based on usage either remove the feature entirely, move it to a less prominent location or make it a user setting.

Patchset Description

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Add patchset description was being shown for merged changes which was not allowed, so easy removal.

When patchset description was not set, the user was shown “No Patchset Description” which was completely unnecessary, hence that was removed as well.

The information was partially redundant as the description was being shown in the patchest dropdown menu already.

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Usage

Based on the usage the decision was to remove the feature entirely.

Daily clicks on “Add Patchset Description” button

Included In

Included in button shows the tags and branches which contain the merged change.

Usage

Decision was to move it to the overflow menu on the top right.

Update Change

Update change dialog was added

as to help new users figure out which how to use Gerrit. A user unfamiliar with Gerrit would not understand they had to click this button to get the commands.

Overall usage was fairly low (< 100 clicks per day) and the dialog was removed from Gerrit.

Merged As

Few clicks on the copy sha button so decision was made to move it to the new Change Summary section

Wishlist

Change Starring

Allow user to configure the change page

Thanks! Questions?