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# Reviewing Zulip code
Code review is a key part of how Zulip does development! If you've
been contributing to Zulip's code, we'd love for you to do reviews.
This is a guide to how. (With some thoughts for writing code too.)
## Protocol for authors
When you send a PR, try to think of a good person to review it --
outside of the handful of people who do a ton of reviews -- and
`@`-mention them with something like "`@person`, would you review
this?". Good choices include
- someone based in your time zone or a nearby time zone
- people working on similar things, or in a loosely related area
Alternatively, posting a message in
[#code-review](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/91-code-review) on [the Zulip
development community server](https://zulip.com/development-community/), would
help in reaching out to a wider group of reviewers. Either way, please be
patient and mindful of the fact that it isn't possible to provide a
quick reply always, but that the reviewer would get to it sooner or later.
Lastly, ensuring that your PR passes CI and is organized into coherent
commits would help save reviewers time, which could otherwise be used
to dive right into reviewing the PR's core functionality.
### Responding to a review feedback
Once you've received a review and resolved any feedback, it's critical
to update the GitHub thread to reflect that. Best practices are to:
- Make sure that CI passes and the PR is rebased onto recent `main`.
- Post comments on each feedback thread explaining at least how you
resolved the feedback, as well as any other useful information
(problems encountered, reasoning for why you picked one of several
options, a test you added to make sure the bug won't recur, etc.).
- Mark any resolved threads as "resolved" in the GitHub UI, if
appropriate.
- Post a summary comment in the main feed for the PR, explaining that
this is ready for another review, and summarizing any changes from
the previous version, details on how you tested the changes, new
screenshots/etc. More detail is better than less, as long as you
take the time to write clearly.
If you resolve the feedback, but the PR has merge conflicts, CI
failures, or the most recent comment is the reviewer asking you to fix
something, it's very likely that a potential reviewer skimming your PR
will assume it isn't ready for review and move on to other work.
If you need help or think an open discussion topic requires more
feedback or a more complex discussion, move the discussion to a topic
in the Zulip development community server. Be sure to provide links
from the GitHub PR to the conversation (and vice versa) so that it's
convenient to read both conversations together.
Code review is a key part of how Zulip does development. It's an essential aspect
of our process to build a high-quality product with a maintainable code base.
## Principles of code review
### Anyone can review
Zulip has an active contributor community, and just a small handful
of maintainers who can do the final rounds of code review. As such, we would
love for contributors to help each other with making pull requests that are not
only correct, but easy to review. Doing so ensures that PRs can be finalized and
merged more quickly, and accelerates the pace of progress for the entire
project.
Anyone can do a code review -- you don't have to have a ton of
experience, and you don't have to have the power to ultimately merge
the PR. If you
If you're new to open source, this may be the first time you do a code review of
anyone's changes! We have therefore written this step-by-step guide to be
accessible to all Zulip contributors.
- read the code, see if you understand what the change is
doing and why, and ask questions if you don't; or
### Reviewing your own code
- fetch the code (for Zulip server code,
[tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request][git tool] is super handy), play around
with it in your dev environment, and say what you think about how
the feature works
One of the best ways to improve the quality of your own work as a software
engineer is to do a code review of your own work before submitting it to others for
review. We thus strongly encourage you to get into the habit of reviewing you
own code. You can often find things you missed by taking a step back to look
over your work before asking others to do so, and this guide will walk you
through the process. Catching mistakes yourself will help your PRs be merged
faster, and folks will appreciate the quality and professionalism of your
work.
those are really helpful contributions.
### Reviewing other contributors' code
### Please do reviews
Doing code reviews is an important part of making the project grow.
Doing code reviews is a valuable contribution to the Zulip project.
It's also an important skill to develop for participating in
open-source projects and working in the industry in general. If
you're contributing to Zulip and have been working in our code for a
little while, we would love for some of your time contributing to come
in the form of doing code reviews!
little while, we would love for you to start doing code reviews!
Anyone can do a code review -- you don't have to have a ton of experience, and
you don't have to have the power to ultimately merge the PR. The sections below
offer accessible, step-by-step guidance for how to go about reviewing Zulip PRs.
For students participating in Google Summer of Code or a similar
program, we expect you to spend a chunk of your time each week (after
the first couple of weeks as you're getting going) doing code reviews.
## How to review code
Whether you are reviewing your own code or somebody else's, this section
describes how to go about it.
If you are reviewing somebody else's code, you will likely need to first fetch
it so that you can play around with the new functionality. If you're working in
the Zulip server codebase, use our [git tool][git-tool]
`tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request` to check out a pull request locally and rebase
it onto `main`.
### Code review checklist
The following review steps apply to the majority of PRs.
**Think about the issue:**
1. Start by **rereading the issue** the PR is intended to solve. Are you
confident that you **understand everything the issue is asking for**? If not,
try exploring the relevant parts of the Zulip app and reading any linked
discussions on the [development community server][czo] to see if the
additional context helps. If any part is still confusing, post a GitHub
comment or a message on the [development community server][czo] explaining
precisely what points you find confusing.
2. Now that you're confident that you understand the issue, **does the PR
address all the points described in the issue**? If not, is it easy to tell
without reading the code which points are not addressed and why? Here is a
handful of good ways for the author to communicate why the issue as written
might not be fully solved by the PR:
- The issue explicitly notes that it's fine for some parts to be completed
separately, and the PR clearly indicates which parts are solved.
- After discussion of initial prototypes (in GitHub comments or on the
[development community server][czo]), it was decided to change some part of
the specification, and the PR notes this.
- The author explains why the PR is a better way to solve the issue than what
was described.
- The solution changed because of changes in the project or application since
the issue was written, and the author explains the adjustments that were
made.
**Think about the code:**
1. Make sure the PR uses **clear function, argument, variable, and test names.**
Every new piece of Zulip code will be read many times by other developers, and
future developers will `grep` for relevant terms when researching a problem, so
it's important that variable names communicate clearly the purpose of each
piece of the codebase.
1. Make sure the PR **avoids duplicated code.** Code duplication is a huge
source of bugs in large projects and makes the codebase difficult to
understand, so we avoid significant code duplication wherever possible.
Sometimes avoiding code duplication involves some refactoring of existing
code; if so, that should usually be done as its own series of commits (not
squashed into other changes or left as a thing to do later). That series of
commits can be in the same pull request as the feature that they support, and
we recommend ordering the history of commits so that the refactoring comes
_before_ the feature. That way, it's easy to merge the refactoring (and
minimize risk of merge conflicts) if there are still user experience issues
under discussion for the feature itself.
1. **Good comments** help. It's often worth thinking about whether explanation
in a commit message or pull request discussion should be included in
a comment, `/docs`, or other documentation. But it's better yet if
verbose explanation isn't needed. We prefer writing code that is
readable without explanation over a heavily commented codebase using
lots of clever tricks.
1. Make sure the PR follows Zulip's **coding style**. See the Zulip [coding
style documentation][code-style] for details. Our goal is to have as much of
this as possible verified via the linters and tests, but there will always be
unusual forms of Python/JavaScript style that our tools don't check for.
1. If you can, step back and think about the **technical design**. There are a
lot of considerations here: security, migration paths/backwards compatibility,
cost of new dependencies, interactions with features, speed of performance,
API changes. Security is especially important and worth thinking about
carefully with any changes to security-sensitive code like views.
**Think about testing:**
1. **The CI build tests need to pass.** One can investigate
any failures and figure out what to fix by clicking on a red X next
to the commit hash or the Detail links on a pull request. (Example:
in [#17584](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/17584),
click the red X before `49b10a3` to see the build jobs
for that commit. You can see that there are 7 build jobs in total.
All the 7 jobs run in GitHub Actions. You can see what caused
the job to fail by clicking on the failed job. This will open
up a page in the CI that has more details on why the job failed.
For example [this](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/runs/2092955762)
is the page of the "Debian 10 Buster (Python 3.7, backend + frontend)" job.
See our docs on [continuous integration](../testing/continuous-integration.md)
to learn more.
2. Make sure **the code is well-tested**; see below for details. The PR should
summarize any [manual testing](#manual-testing) that was done to validate
that the feature is working as expected.
**Think about the commits:**
1. Does the PR follow the principle that “**Each commit is a minimal coherent
idea**”? See the [commit discipline guide][commit-discipline] to learn more
about commit structure in Zulip.
2. Does each commit have a **clear commit message**? Check for content, format,
spelling and grammar. See the [Zulip version control][commit-messages]
documentation for details on what we look for.
You should also go through any of the following checks that are applicable:
- _Error handling._ The code should always check for invalid user
input. User-facing error messages should be clear and when possible
be actionable (it should be obvious to the user what they need to do
in order to correct the problem).
- _Translation._ Make sure that the strings are marked for
[translation].
- _Completeness of refactoring._ When reviewing a refactor, verify that the changes are
complete. Usually, one can check that efficiently using `git grep`,
and it's worth it, as we very frequently find issues by doing so.
- _Documentation updates._ If this changes how something works, does it
update the documentation in a corresponding way? If it's a new
feature, is it documented, and documented in the right place?
- _mypy annotations in Python code._ New functions should be annotated using
[mypy] and existing annotations should be updated. Use of `Any`, `ignore`, and
unparameterized containers should be limited to cases where a more precise
type cannot be specified.
### Automated testing
- The tests should **validate that the feature works correctly**, and
specifically test for common error conditions, bad user input, and potential
bugs that are likely for the type of change being made. Tests that exclude
whole classes of potential bugs are preferred when possible (e.g., the common
test suite `test_markdown.py` between the Zulip server's [frontend and backend
Markdown processors](../subsystems/markdown.md), or the `GetEventsTest` test
for buggy race condition handling). See the [test writing][test-writing]
documentation to learn more.
- We are trying to maintain ~100% test coverage on the backend, so backend
changes should have negative tests for the various error conditions. See
[backend testing documentation][backend-testing] for details.
- If the feature involves frontend changes, there should be frontend tests. See
[frontend testing documentation][frontend-testing] for details.
### Manual testing
If the PR makes any frontend changes, you should make sure to play with the part
of the app being changed to validate that things look and work as expected.
While not all of the situations below will apply, here are some ideas for things
that should be tested if they are applicable. Use the [development
environment][development-environment] to test any webapp changes.
This might seem like a long process, but you can go through it quite quickly
once you get the hang of it. Trust us, it will save time and review round-trips
down the line!
**Visual appearance:**
- Open up the parts of the UI that were changed, and make sure they look as
you were expecting.
- Is the new UI consistent with similar UI elements? Think about fonts, colors,
sizes, etc. If a new or modified element has multiple states (e.g. "on" and
"off"), consider all of them.
- Is the new UI aligned correctly with the elements around it, both vertically and
horizontally?
- If the PR adds or modifies a clickable element, does it have a hover behavior
that's consistent with similar UI elements?
- If the PR adds or modifies an element (e.g. a button or checkbox) that is
sometimes disabled, is the disabled version of the UI consistent with similar
UI elements?
- Did the PR accidentally affect any other parts of the UI? E.g., if the PR
modifies some CSS, look for other elements that may have been altered
unintentionally. Use `git grep` to see if the code you modified is being used
elsewhere.
- Now check all of the above in the other theme (light/dark).
**Responsiveness and internationalization:**
- Check the new UI at different window sizes, including mobile sizes (you can
use Chrome DevTools if you like). Does it look good in both wide and narrow
windows?
- To simulate what will happen when the UI is translated to different languages,
try changing any new strings, or ones that are now displayed differently, to
make them 1.5x longer, and check if anything breaks. What would happen if the
strings were half as long as in English?
**Strings (text):**
If the PR adds or modifies strings, check the following:
- Does the wording seem consistent with similar features (similar style, level
of detail, etc.)?
- If there is a number, are the `N = 1` and `N > 1` cases both handled properly?
**Tooltips:**
- Do elements that require tooltips have them? Check similar elements to see
whether a tooltip is needed, and what information it should contain.
**Functionality:**
We're finally getting to the part where you actually use the new/updated
feature. :) Test to see if it works as expected, trying a variety of scenarios.
If it works as described in the issue but seems awkward in some way, note this
on the PR.
If relevant, be sure to check that:
- Live updates are working as expected.
- Keyboard navigation, including tabbing to the interactive elements, is working
as expected.
Some scenarios to consider:
- Try clicking on any interactive elements, multiple times, in a variety of orders.
- If the feature affects the **message view**, try it out in different types of
narrows: topic, stream, All messages, PMs.
- If the feature affects the **compose box** in the webapp, try both ways of
[resizing the compose box](https://zulip.com/help/resize-the-compose-box).
Test both stream messages and PMs.
- If the feature might require **elevated permissions**, check it out as a user who has
permissions to use it and one who does not.
- Think about how the feature might **interact with other features**, and try out
such scenarios. For example:
- If the PR adds a banner, is it possible that it would be shown at the same
time as other banners? Does something reasonable happen?
- If the feature has to do with topic editing, do you need to think
about what happens when a topic is resolved/unresolved?
- If it's a message view feature, would anything go wrong if the message was
collapsed or muted? If it was colored like an `@`-mention or a PM?
## Review process and communication
### Asking for a code review
There are a few good ways to ask for a code review:
- Are there folks who have been working on similar things, or a loosely related
area? If so, they might be a good person to review your PR. `@`-mention them
with something like "`@person`, would you be up for reviewing this?" If
you're not sure whether they are familiar with the code review process, you
can also include a link to this guide.
- If you're not sure who to ask, you can post a message in
[#code-review](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/91-code-review) on [the Zulip
development community server](https://zulip.com/development-community/) to reach
out to a wider group of potential reviewers.
- If you would like feedback on user-facing changes, you can `@`-mention `@alya`
on your PR. She can also help find someone to review the code once the PR is
ready from a product perspective.
- Finally, if you are not sure who should review the PR, just indicate clearly
that it is ready for review, and the project maintainers will take a look and
follow up with next steps.
With any of these approaches, please be patient and mindful of the fact that it
isn't always possible to provide a quick reply. Going though the [review
process](#how-to-review-code) described above for your own PR will make your
code easier and faster to review, which makes it much more likely that it will
be reviewed quickly and require fewer review cycles.
### Fast replies are key
For the author of a PR, getting feedback quickly is really important
@@ -105,127 +331,41 @@ benchmark is to try to always reply **within one workday**, at least
with a short initial reply, if you're working regularly on Zulip. And
sooner is better.
## Things to look for
- _The CI build._ The tests need to pass. One can investigate
any failures and figure out what to fix by clicking on a red X next
to the commit hash or the Detail links on a pull request. (Example:
in [#17584](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/17584),
click the red X before `49b10a3` to see the build jobs
for that commit. You can see that there are 7 build jobs in total.
All the 7 jobs run in GitHub Actions. You can see what caused
the job to fail by clicking on the failed job. This will open
up a page in the CI that has more details on why the job failed.
For example [this](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/runs/2092955762)
is the page of the "Debian 10 Buster (Python 3.7, backend + frontend)" job.
See our docs on [continuous integration](../testing/continuous-integration.md)
to learn more.
- _Technical design._ There are a lot of considerations here:
security, migration paths/backwards compatibility, cost of new
dependencies, interactions with features, speed of performance, API
changes. Security is especially important and worth thinking about
carefully with any changes to security-sensitive code like views.
- _User interface and visual design._ If frontend changes are
involved, the reviewer will check out the code, play with the new
UI, and verify it for both quality and consistency with the rest of
the Zulip UI. We highly encourage posting screenshots to save
reviewers time in getting a feel for what the feature looks like --
you'll get a quicker response that way.
- _Error handling._ The code should always check for invalid user
input. User-facing error messages should be clear and when possible
be actionable (it should be obvious to the user what they need to do
in order to correct the problem).
- _Testing._ The tests should validate that the feature works
correctly, and specifically test for common error conditions, bad
user input, and potential bugs that are likely for the type of
change being made. Tests that exclude whole classes of potential
bugs are preferred when possible (e.g., the common test suite
`test_markdown.py` between the Zulip server's [frontend and backend
Markdown processors](../subsystems/markdown.md), or the `GetEventsTest` test for
buggy race condition handling).
- _Translation._ Make sure that the strings are marked for
[translation].
- _Clear function, argument, variable, and test names._ Every new
piece of Zulip code will be read many times by other developers, and
future developers will grep for relevant terms when researching a
problem, so it's important that variable names communicate clearly
the purpose of each piece of the codebase.
- _Duplicated code._ Code duplication is a huge source of bugs in
large projects and makes the codebase difficult to understand, so we
avoid significant code duplication wherever possible. Sometimes
avoiding code duplication involves some refactoring of existing
code; if so, that should usually be done as its own series of
commits (not squashed into other changes or left as a thing to do
later). That series of commits can be in the same pull request as
the feature that they support, and we recommend ordering the history
of commits so that the refactoring comes _before_ the feature. That
way, it's easy to merge the refactoring (and minimize risk of merge
conflicts) if there are still user experience issues under
discussion for the feature itself.
- _Completeness._ When reviewing a refactor, verify that the changes are
complete. Usually, one can check that efficiently using `git grep`,
and it's worth it, as we very frequently find issues by doing so.
- _Documentation updates._ If this changes how something works, does it
update the documentation in a corresponding way? If it's a new
feature, is it documented, and documented in the right place?
- _Good comments._ It's often worth thinking about whether explanation
in a commit message or pull request discussion should be included in
a comment, `/docs`, or other documentation. But it's better yet if
verbose explanation isn't needed. We prefer writing code that is
readable without explanation over a heavily commented codebase using
lots of clever tricks.
- _Coding style._ See the Zulip [code-style] documentation for
details. Our goal is to have as much of this as possible verified
via the linters and tests, but there's always going to be unusual
forms of Python/JavaScript style that our tools don't check for.
- _Clear commit messages._ See the [Zulip version
control][commit-messages] documentation for details on what we look
for.
### Zulip server
Some points specific to the Zulip server codebase:
- _Testing -- Backend._ We are trying to maintain ~100% test coverage
on the backend, so backend changes should have negative tests for
the various error conditions.
- _Testing -- Frontend._ If the feature involves frontend changes,
there should be frontend tests. See the [test
writing][test-writing] documentation for more details.
- _mypy annotations._ New functions should be annotated using [mypy]
and existing annotations should be updated. Use of `Any`, `ignore`,
and unparameterized containers should be limited to cases where a
more precise type cannot be specified.
## Tooling
To make it easier to review pull requests, if you're working in the
Zulip server codebase, use our [git tool]
`tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request` to check out a pull request locally
and rebase it onto `main`.
If a pull request just needs a little fixing to make it mergeable,
feel free to do that in a new commit, then push your branch to GitHub
and mention the branch in a comment on the pull request. That'll save
the maintainer time and get the PR merged quicker.
### Responding to review feedback
Once you've received a review and resolved any feedback, it's critical
to update the GitHub thread to reflect that. Best practices are to:
- Make sure that CI passes and the PR is rebased onto recent `main`.
- Post comments on each feedback thread explaining at least how you
resolved the feedback, as well as any other useful information
(problems encountered, reasoning for why you picked one of several
options, a test you added to make sure the bug won't recur, etc.).
- Post a summary comment in the main feed for the PR, explaining that
this is ready for another review, and summarizing any changes from
the previous version, details on how you tested the changes, new
screenshots/etc. More detail is better than less, as long as you
take the time to write clearly.
If you resolve the feedback, but the PR has merge conflicts, CI
failures, or the most recent comment is the reviewer asking you to fix
something, it's very likely that a potential reviewer skimming your PR
will assume it isn't ready for review and move on to other work.
If you need help or think an open discussion topic requires more
feedback or a more complex discussion, move the discussion to a topic
in the [Zulip development community server][czo]. Be sure to provide links
from the GitHub PR to the conversation (and vice versa) so that it's
convenient to read both conversations together.
## Additional resources
We also strongly recommend reviewers to go through the following resources.
We also recommend the following resources on code reviews.
- [The Gentle Art of Patch Review](https://sage.thesharps.us/2014/09/01/the-gentle-art-of-patch-review/)
article by Sarah Sharp
@@ -237,8 +377,13 @@ We also strongly recommend reviewers to go through the following resources.
- [Zulip code of conduct](../code-of-conduct.md)
[code-style]: code-style.md
[commit-discipline]: version-control.md#commit-discipline
[commit-messages]: version-control.md#commit-messages
[test-writing]: ../testing/testing.md
[backend-testing]: ../testing/testing-with-django.md
[frontend-testing]: ../testing/testing-with-node.md
[mypy]: ../testing/mypy.md
[git tool]: ../git/zulip-tools.md#fetch-a-pull-request-and-rebase
[git-tool]: ../git/zulip-tools.md#fetch-a-pull-request-and-rebase
[translation]: ../translating/translating.md
[czo]: https://zulip.com/development-community/
[development-environment]: ../development/overview.md