As you can see in  bug #607084 , we ran into a case where there were 0 DUTs available.

From the sheriffing docs, the points of sheriffing are:

1. Make sure build blocking failures are identified and addressed in a timely fashion.

2. Manually watch over our build system in ways automation doesn’t/can’t do.

3. Give developers a chance to learn a little more about how build works and breaks.


#1: mostly this is identifying problems and finding owners.  If there are 0 DUTs available then the problem is clear and the owner is clear.  The sheriff can act as a nag, but it doesn't seem like a terribly good use of resources.  If the teams in charge of fixing this need a sheriff to nag them to get this done then we should fix that.  Perhaps we can create an auto-nagger robot but have it sent email as if it looks like it came from the sheriffs if everyone is ignoring the robots?

#2. the automation catches this just fine.

#3. sheriffs can't actually do anything about this except nag, so learning opportunities are slim to none.

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Making it clear that this is not the sheriff's job to deal with will help reduce sheriffs frustration and help make sure that when there _is_ something sheriffs should deal with that they'll pay attention to it.


NOTE: continuing to _notify_ sheriffs of problems like this is still quite important.  I simply wish the message to help the sheriff know what to do about the failure.

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So right now, I get this message in my inbox:

master-paladin has encountered infra failures:

guado_moblab-paladin: The HWTest [moblab_quick] stage failed: **
HWTest did not complete due to infrastructure issues (code 3) ** in
https://uberchromegw.corp.google.com/i/chromeos/builders/guado_moblab-paladin/builds/2432

See https://uberchromegw.corp.google.com/i/chromeos/builders/master-paladin/builds/10952

-

It could change to:

master-paladin has encountered infra failures:

guado_moblab-paladin: The HWTest [moblab_quick] stage failed: **
HWTest did not complete due to infrastructure issues (code 3) ** in
https://uberchromegw.corp.google.com/i/chromeos/builders/guado_moblab-paladin/builds/2432

It has been identified that there is nothing that the build sheriff can
do to help this failure.  Sheriffs: sit tight until the problem is fixed.
If you would like to ping someone on the status of this problem, please
ping on #crospfq IRC or look at the Infrastructure Rotation and ping
the Infrastructure Deputy.

See https://uberchromegw.corp.google.com/i/chromeos/builders/master-paladin/builds/10952