Sheriffing/Handovers

This page is meant as help how to do handover between on-duty sheriffs. Its not meant as set in stone checklist for handovers (like do step 1 -> x before handoff) its more meant as help and best-practice to do handovers.

Also since we are Service Organization with the devs as our "customers/partners/users" maybe this helps to make handovers more open and so increase the Sheriffs visibility

General Duty Time-Line

Starting from a typical Monday morning 0am Pacific Time the normal Sheriffduty timeline looks like:

(all times are Pacific Time)

Tomcat 23:00 am Sunday - 8am Monday -> hands over to RyanVM around till X -> hands over to Kwierso (typically on duty in afternoons)

supported by our Awesome Philor and Nigelb

Hand over Process

1.) Communicate!!! When you hand over Sheriffduty to the next Sheriff please communicate with your peer before dropping off. This is meant to not surprise your peer (oh! is it already that time) and to make sure he is aware that he is on duty. Same is for ongoing issues like tree closures etc that make a start from your peer into sheriff-duty more easily. You can do this hand-over also in a public irc channel like #ateam or #developers - benefit is that is that others are then also aware of the duty-change and this increase sheriff-visibility!

Of course this does not mean you have to wait for a peer if she/he is running late or not responding to irc pings in a reasonable time and you need to drop off etc...

2.) 123 unclassified items ?? -> untriaged failures! In order to make the hand-over as smooth as possible it would be great if you could handover a tree with as few unclassified failures as possible. Just as you would wish this from your peer that is on-duty before you. Just image you start your sheriffduty with 123 unclassified failures - that's a hell of start into a day :)

3.) Teamwork as much as possible - we all have different tasks/deliverables beside Sheriffduty (even when this is our main work item). In order to fulfil all the tasks, sheriff work depends a lot on teamwork. This means like just depending on one person for checkin-needed is neither good or desirable in terms of service quality or when this person is sick.

So just make sure you check the bug queries like checkin-needed or uplifts [documentation link to come] during your sheriffduty time to be able to respond to task like checkin-needed and so to keep the load on the next peer workable.

Special Tasks

Of course there are special tasks/duties during a sheriffduty day that is not covered by normal handovers for all team members:

Some of them listed below - and maybe this list is interesting and helpful for others (and gives also room for improvements)

--> [Tomcat] due to be the first (or the last) in the sheriffduty line - check the last 50 csets for unclassified failures do to long build/etc --> [Tomcat] due to b2g nightlies at 9am GMT we need to merge b2g-inbound early to make that nightly train in order to provide latest builds to QA