Contents

Upcoming Schedule

Schedule. Please adjust as appropriate:

2022

2023

• 1/2/23 - 1/13: Feanil Patel

• 1/16 - 1/27: Feanil Patel & Kyle McCormick

• 1/30 - 2/3: Kyle McCormick (shadowed by Brian Smith)

• 2/6 - 2/17 Brian Smith

• 2/20 - 3/3: Brian Mesick

• 3/6 - 3/17: Adolfo Brandes

• 3/20 - 3/24: Dave Ormsbee (Axim)

• 3/27 - 3/31: No on-call, it’s the Open edX Conference!

• 4/3 - 4/7: Limited on-call (in-person week). Let’s share tickets or spend a little co-working time 2-3x during the week to knock important stuff out / cleaning up from the previous week.

• 4/10 - 4/14 : Dave Ormsbee (Axim)

• 4/17 - 4/28: Edward Zarecor

• <>: Sarina Canelake

Details

🔔 What is axim-oncall?

• A lightweight rotation of Axim engineers, ensuring that someone is always responsible for responding to administrative requests from the community.

❌ What isn’t axim-oncall?

• Something that should be done outside of normal working hours.

• Something that should affect weekends, holidays, or PTO.

• Pager duty.

• A designation that you need to handle ALL incoming community requests yourself.

📒 What are the responsibilities?

• Respond to GitHub Requests within one business day.

  • Requests should automatically ping the @openedx/axim-oncall GitHub group.

  • Assign yourself to the issue.

  • If you can’t resolve the request within a day, that is fine. Just give an “Ack” and a general timeline estimate.

  • Please note that users must also be added to the CLA check database. The specifics are documented here.

• By the end of the sprint, ensure each GitHub Request is either:

  • closed, or

  • explicitly reviewed & handed off to the next on-call engineer at the beginning of the following sprint.

• Respond to other pings to the @openedx/axim-oncall group if they happen.

• Keep an eye on the #ask-axim Slack channel. If Axim-oriented questions come up that nobody is responding to, bring them up in daily standup so we don’t forget about them.

⁉️ How do I handle requests?

• All our on-call processes are documented here: On-call Playbooks

  • If new things come up or if processes change, update that document!

• The best way to see all open requests is by going to the axim-engineering repo’s issues and filtering for github-request: https://github.com/openedx/tcril-engineering/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Agithub-request

• If you are swamped during the sprint, delegate to other team members. You don’t need to do all the work yourself.

🌀 How does the rotation work?

• Rotation order is defined at the top of this page.

• At the semi-weekly Planning Meeting, the on-call engineer switches to the next person in the order. Switching process:

  • Update the @openedx/axim-oncall GitHub group.

  • The on-call engineer should audit their personal list of assigned issues. For issues that are related to on-call, the engineer can decide to “keep” the issue or “hand off” the issue to the next on-call engineer.

  • Make sure to update the assignee when handing off an issue.

• If the on-call engineer is on PTO during their turn in the rotation, they should trade days with another engineer or trade the entire sprint. Don’t do on-call from vacation

🧠 Anything else to know?

• Record any access changes or decisions you make in GitHub issues. This will help us keep track of what changes we make and why.

• To be on the rotation, you will need admin (“owner”) rights on the openedx GitHub organization, which will confer you admin-level rights to all repositories in the organization. Be judicious with these. In the majority of cases we should be abiding by all normal branch protection rules.

  • Appropriate uses of admin rights include:

    • Handling Axim GitHub Requests.

    • Fixing minutiae like out-of-date documentation links or typos in repository descriptions.

    • Merging without review or CI validation in order to fix CI itself or update repository metadata (openedx.yml).

  • Inappropriate uses include:

    • Merging app code without appropriate review and CI validation.

    • Adding or removing access rights when there is no corresponding Axim GitHub Request.