Peer Review.
This page sets out general guidance for standards of review. It intends to help raise awareness in issues that could be encountered while preparing to release code.
When reviewing code, it is recommended that you consult pre-existing sources of peer review guidance. The ONS duck book provides low, moderate and high quality peer review checklists [1]. The NHS fit for publishing checklist [2] is also a useful tool for peer review.
At the time of writing, the following sources were compared with review considerations collated from Campus colleagues. The following checks were not explicitly covered in the Duckbook or NHS checklists and are presented here for completeness.
Warning: Not a complete checklist. Please consult the sources above to ensure code is of an appropriate quality prior to publication.
- Check for broken links in the documentation.
- Actively try to break the code by considering edge cases. Are the important exceptions raised correctly?
- Is the API intuitive and consistent? Do modules follow the same naming conventions etc?
- Create a new environment and rebuild the package. A useful way to detect breaking changes in dependencies.
- On pull request, note any merge conflicts between the feature and target branch.