Code and System Review#

Purpose of the review#

The purpose of the code/system review is to analyse a change for its impact and to ensure that all concerned parties are made aware of changes that are required.

Fundamentally this review is to ensure that the change is well thought-out and that no system aspects have been missed. The review should be an active one and should question anything that is poorly coded.

Reviewer responsibilities and checkpoints#

The Code/System review template exists to help you think through all the areas of concern. A completed review template should be appended to the ticket once you are finished.

Work through the code review template considering each question in turn. These will include areas such as:

Is the ticket and testing complete?
  • A Ticket Summary should be attached and filled in. This includes:

    • Proof of testing completed. All tests should pass with the exception of any known changes in answers.

    • Approvals from the code owners for every file changed.

    • If the change affects answers then approval from the owners of the affected configurations.

    • If the change modifies OMP code sections then approval from the optimisation team.

  • It should be possible to understand the purpose of the ticket from the details provided.

Tip

The testing summary (trac.log) provides details of the code and configuration owner approvals needed for each change. The approvals should be added by the owners themselves and this can be checked using the page history.

Tip

If the ticket has been completed by a non-Met Office developer it is useful to run tests ourselves early in the review process as different compilers may behave differently. It may also be necessary to run tests for systems that the partner has not had access to.

Tip

Quantity of testing required will vary with the complexity of the change and the repositories involved. Developer test groups are required as a minimum. As a guide for further testing consider the following:

  • does the change affect answers? If so all group must be run

  • does the change affect multiple repositories? If so the UM testing must include e.g. the jules or ukca groups as appropriate

  • had the reconfiguration been altered? If so the UM testing must include the recon group

  • is there another rose-stem group that covers this area of code? See Testing the UM for common examples

Is this a multi-repository ticket?

Each of the repositories covered by these WPs have overlapping use of code.

The Ticket Summary/Code Review templates in each repository contain the details of when testing against other repositories are required. These highlight where the code is likely to interact. e.g. if code in the shared/science folder in JULES is modified then both the UM and LFRIc Apps test suites will need to be run with that change.

If this testing doesn’t pass then either

  1. the change in ticket will need modifying so that the parent repository’s test suite passes

  2. this change requires a linked ticket in that repository so that all tests can pass.

Tip

All linked tickets are reviewed as a group. Each ticket in the group should contain links to all the others and the correct keywords applied to make it easier to keep track of them all.

Care is needed when committing these tickets.

Is the code up to scratch?

Generally this is about making sure the code complies with the relevant style guides, and is consistent with the design of the code it sits in.

This page provides some common (though UM-centric) things to confirm and think about. It is not an exhaustive list, just a starting point.

Final decision points and actions#

The ticket will likely iterate between the reviewer and the developer during the review process while retaining it’s code review status. However, the reviewer has the option to “reject and assign” back to the code author should the documentation or code not meet the required standards and major alterations/improvements are required. In this case the change will need a further SciTech review before it can be returned to the code reviewer.

Once you are happy that the change is appropriate and correct, complete the approval section of the Code/System review template and change the ticket status to approved.

From here follow the How To Commit guide through to ticket closure.

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