Review process

The reviewer/maintainer undertakes to carry out the review quickly, and is also responsible for closing request changes, check commit history and quickly merge the pull request if allowed.

We propose you a few tips and recommendations that we think are relevant to a human, relevant and rewarding code review for all contributors:

• How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You? by Michael Lynch.
• How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human? by Michael Lynch.

Here’s a suggested workflow.

It can be useful to communicate via instant messaging (Matrix, Slack, etc.) in order to guarantee the smooth flow of PR validation.

sequenceDiagram
  actor A as PR author
  actor R as Reviewer/Maintainer
  
  A->>R: Asks for a review, notifying some people
  R->>A: Answers yes or no
  
  loop Loop between author and reviewer
    R-->>A: Comments, asks for changes
    A-->>R: Answers to comments or requested changes
    A-->>R: Makes necessary changes in dedicated "fixups"
    R-->>A: Reviews, tests changes, and comments again
    R-->>A: Resolves requested changes/conversations if ok
  end
 
  A->>R: Rebase and apply fixups
  R->>A: Checks commits history
  R->>A: Approves or closes the PR
  Note left of R: & Merges if maintainer

If the reviewer is not maintainer, the PR’s author has the responsability to contact a maintainer to merge the PR. In special cases (especially near feature freeze), maintainer should be found early.

The code review pyramid