Code Review

Code Review

The SHARE developers work together to make sure that every piece of code written gets a second (and sometimes third) pair of eyes. This accomplishes a few things:

• Every member of the team knows each piece of code, and so increases ownership and maintainability
• New members of the team can get a chance to go over the code in detail, to understand how it works
• Bugs can get caught and fixed before they ever make it into production

Here's how our code review process works:

1. Create a new branch using the git-flow workflow system.

• Feature branches are made off of the develop (or staging) branch
• Hotfix branches are made off the master (production) branch

2. When ready, make a pull request back to the original source branch
3. Other developers on the project will go over the code in the pull request, asking questions and making comments line by line using github
4. Respond to the questions and comments with answers or changes, and then re-push the code to the reviewed branch
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4, sometimes with a second code-reviewing developer, until all questions or comments have been addressed
6. The feature or hotfix branch can then be merged into the main repository