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Rejecting a draft

Normally, we want work to keep moving forwards through our publishing pipe. This means that even if an article needs more input from a writer, the article stays in the 'qa' stage while the writer and qa engineer discuss how to complete it.

In exceptional cases where a writer has submitted a draft that is not up to standard, a qa engineer should reject the draft and send it back to the writer to work on alone. In this case we move the article back to 'drafting' stage, and it resumes its journey through the pipe once the writer resubmits it.

How and when to reject a draft

A qa engineer should reject a draft if they think that the writer has submitted something that is far below our normal publishing standards and can't easily be fixed without a major rework. This includes

  • Failure to meet the requirements set out in the brief
  • Missing dependencies or code samples
  • Broken code
  • Formatting or rendering errors
  • Any specific problems that have been mentioned to that writer before with a request to avoid them in future

Steps to reject a draft

Post a link to the article in #ritza-editing, with

  • Some information for the editing and qa team (e.g. 1-2 bullet points) about why you think the article should be rejected
  • Some feedback to the writer
  • Any context you know that you think is useful about why the writer might have submitted an article with these mistakes

In the channel we will then discuss and decide whether to:

  • Decide to reject the draft - send the article back to 'draft' stage and give the writer the feedback, and schedule a call with the writer to discuss. This will usually take priority over other work the writer has started working on in the interim
  • Decide to keep the article in qa. The qa reviewer and writer will have a call or Slack discussion and fix the article collaboratively.
  • Decide to proceed with a bulldozer qa. The QA engineer will finish the article for the writer without writer input.

Example

I think we should reject this draft <github.com/ritza-co/...> 

Reason:
* The first steps don't work. I get errors when running the given commands.

Feedback to writer:
* <link to doc, or several bullets on slack, or suggestion that this should be done in a call rather>

Extra Context:
*