Peer review with GitHub

GitHub code reviews are a method to vastly improve the quality of code, train new community members, and learn from other community members. In this section, we describe how to perform a pull request review.

Peer review duty

All community members are encouraged to perform reviews. If possible, all code that is merged should be reviewed and marked Approved by at least one other community member prior to merging. In order for this system to function smoothly, community members must perform more reviews than submit patches. Any community member can register for a GitHub account and perform a review.

Please review any patch of interest open for review on GitHub; it is not necessary for the author to request your review.

Review comments

To start a review, open the pull request, then click on an individual commit. Or, view all files changed in the topic branch by clicking Files changed.

When reviewing files, inline comments can be entered by clicking on a the + button that pops up when hovering with a mouse to the right of the source code line numbers. When creating the first comment, select Add a single comment, which will send an email per comment, or select Start a review, which sends all inline comments along with the summary comment in a single email to the author.

After all inline comments have been made, click the Review changes button, optionally enter a summary comment, and optionally mark the pull request with Approve or Request changes. If inline comments were entered, please provide an indication in the overall review comment with a phrase like, “Please see inline comments.”

Review ratings

Approve

Everything looks good – ready to merge.

Comment

The code was not examined or a neutral remark was made.

Request changes

Some issues were identified in the code that should be addressed.