Community Code Review

Welcome to the website of the Community Code Review Working Group of DHTech!

Code review is a widespread technique to improve software and reduce the number of flaws. In a code review, a programmer (other than the original code author(s)) reviews the source code. They ask questions and make suggestions for improving the software. In addition to identifying and eliminating errors, code review can improve overall quality by making the source code more readable and maintainable.

Many Digital Humanities projects are build by rather small teams which makes such reviews challenging. This working group has developed a community code review system for the digital humanities to enable external reviews by volunteers.

You can become part of the working group in various roles. Submit your code or join the pool of potential reviewers or facilitators. You are also welcome to join our working group meetings, see DHTech Working Groups.

Submit Code for Review   Become a Reviewer   Become a Facilitator

Our Process

We are always trying to improve our code review process to fit best for the needs of the community. Currently, our process is as follows.

• We try to find two reviewers for each piece of code that is submitted for review.
• We schedule two weeks for the review to be completed.
• We schedule an half hour Zoom meeting at the beginning of the review period with both reviewers and the submitter(s) of the code to discuss general questions such as the problem the code is trying to solve, general setup requirements, and any other questions the reviewers might have.
• Reviewers and submitters are being added to a channel in the DHTech Slack workspace where they can communicate about the code and during the review process.
• Reviews are being conducted via pull requests in GitHub.
• We schedule a 1 hour wrap up Zoom meeting with reviewers and submitters to discuss the reviewer's comments on the code and any questions reviewers or submitters might have.
• Submitters are asked to recognize the work of the reviewers by adding their names to the code's repository or in other places where it makes sense.

Submission Deadlines

Our quarterly deadlines to submit code for review are as follows:

• March 31
• June 30
• September 30
• December 31

Submit Code for Review   Become a Reviewer   Become a Facilitator

Updates from the Working Group!

19 February 2025

2024 was a busy year for the Code Review Working Group! We completed four reviews, switched to quarterly submission deadlines, and presented our work at DHTech’s mini-conference “DH Inside Out” at DH2024.

We plan 2025 to be just as exciting and succesful but we need your help! Do you have code that could benefit from being reviewed? Maybe...

Read more...