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Reviewing Zulip server code

This document is a brief discussion of what we look for when reviewing contributions to Zulip. It's meant partially for developers who want to get their code merged faster, and partially for developers who have made successful pull requests already and would like to start participating in code review.

Things to look for

  • The Travis 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 #1219, click the red X next to f1f474e to see the build jobs for that commit, at least one of which has failed. Click on the link for Travis continuous integrations details to see the tests Travis ran on that commit, at least one of which failed, and go to one of the failing tests to see the error.) Since Coveralls's data on changes isn't always accurate, one should look at the test coverage situation directly.

  • 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_bugdown.py between the frontend and backend Markdown processors or the GetEventsTest test for buggy race condition handling).

    Backend: we are trying to maintain ~100% test coverage on the backend, so backend changes should have negative tests for the various error conditions. Frontend: If the feature involves frontend changes, there should be frontend tests. See the 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 containser should be limited to cases where a more precise type cannot be specified.

  • 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. For refactorings, 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 documentation for details on what we look for.

Tooling

To make it easier to review pull requests, use our git tool tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request to check out a pull request locally and rebase it against master. 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.

Additional Resources

We also strongly recommend reviewers to go through the following resources.