Plugin Repo: New sortable column (zip size and/or number of lines)

[mrfoxtalbot]

When triaging new plugin to review, the Plugins team would benefit from having a quick visual way to see the size and complexity of plugins in order to asses how long the review is likely going to take. This would also allow newer team members to start working on "easier" reviews.

To this effect, we could introduce a new column in the Repo Plugins CPT listing and show the number of lines or the total ZIP file. The first option would be more accurate but the second one might be easier to implement.

Ideally this column would be sortable.

[alanfuller]

Replying to mrfoxtalbot:

This would also allow newer team members to start working on "easier" reviews.

How would this balance with the first come first served impartiality of the queue? Would you start an easy review in preference to a hard review and then delay teh reply? Would that still not delay the hard review?

Would this problem exist once the team is fully trained? Would this problem exist once the onboarding process is optimal?

My gut feel is that this raises more questions than benefits.

[dd32]

How would this balance with the first come first served impartiality of the queue?

That's never really been the case, it's mostly FIFO, but there's no hard rule that reviews must be done in order.

It's also totally understandable that someone would pick and choose "easy" reviews in a given state-of-mind, being able to quickly approve (or reject!) a dozen plugins is just as useful as performing a single big-plugin review (And believe me, there's some doozies sometimes, I'm talking 10+ MB of PHP).

---

I've personally looked at adding these fields in the past, and I found it didn't actually help as much as I thought it would. I believe I've previously shared a spreadsheet with the reviewers of the Zip size / LOC for pending plugins, and it didn't show much benefit.

Fewer lines of code mean fewer things to review, but it doesn't necessarily reduce the number of issues that need to be addressed in that code.

Smaller ZIPs should technically be faster to review, but a 5KB zip file can contain a lot of compressed text data, that a 1MB zip containing a dozen screenshots and a fraction of that in text.

I'll see if the code I had for this is still handy, and see about adding it.

[dd32]

In 13021:

Plugin Directory: Reviewer Tools: Introduce a ZIP & lines-of-code column to the posts table.

See #7285.

[dd32]

In 13024:

Plugin Directory: Reviewer Tools: Make the Zip & LOC columns sortable, cleanup the sort metadata after the ZIP is removed.

See #7285.

[dd32]

In 13034:

Plugin Directory: Reviewer tools: More consistent UI for the extra columns, and hide irrelevant columns for non-pending views.

See #7285.

[dd32]

lines-of-code column

It might make sense to exclude vendor and node_modules type directories from that.

[dd32]

with no followup requests from the reviewers, I'm going to mark this as closed for now.