Quick Facts

• 2 week sprint-aligned rotation within standard business hours.

• @openedx/tcril-oncall is the GitHub group.

• Ask for help if you need it!

Upcoming Schedule

Schedule. Please adjust as appropriate:

• 4/18-4/29: Dave Ormsbee (Axim)

• 5/2 - 5/13: Dave Ormsbee (Axim) (covering for Carlos Muniz (Unlicensed) )

• 5/16-5/27: Feanil Patel

• 5/30-6/10: Adolfo Brandes

• 6/13-6/24: Carlos Muniz (Unlicensed) (covering for Kyle McCormick )

• 6/27-7/8: Edward Zarecor

• 7/11 - 7/22: Sarina Canelake

Details

🔔 What is tcril-oncall?

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

❌ What isn’t tcril-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. See inline instructions for “Common Requests”.

  • Requests should automatically ping the @openedx/tcril-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.

• Review and merge CLA PRs, delete related branches. Currently a PR is created daily, many of which are empty – we’ll work on improving the Zap to account for this.

• Ensure each GitHub Request is either closed within the sprint or explicitly reviewed & handed off to the next on-call engineer at the beginning of the following sprint.

  • If you are swamped during the sprint, delegate to other team members!

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

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

🌀 How does the rotation work?

• The order of the rotation is defined by the list of people on the tCRIL Engineering homepage, excluding Ed and Jenna.

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

  • Update the @openedx/tcril-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 tCRIL 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 tCRIL GitHub Request.