Perform a Gerrit Review

Description

Gerrit code reviews are a method to vastly improve the quality of code, train new community members, and learn from other community members. In this session, we describe how to perform a review.

Peer review duty

All community members are encouraged to perform reviews. If possible, all code that is merged should be reviewed and marked Approved by at least one other community member prior to merging. In order for this system to function smoothly, community members must perform more reviews than submit patches.

Any community member can register for a Gerrit account and perform a review a “+1” or “-1” review. Experienced community members can perform “+2” reviews required for merges.

Please review any patch of interest open for review on Gerrit; it is not necessary for the author to request your review.

Review comments

When reviewing files, inline comments can be entered by double-clicking on a line. Hitting Save on the text box that pops will store the comment as a Draft comment. Draft comments will not be visible to other people until the final review is submitted. When submitting the final review, general comments can also be given. If inline comments were entered, please indicate that in the overall review comment with a phrase like, “Please see inline comments.”

Review ratings

There are two classes of review ratings, the Verified score and the Code Review score. The Verified score refers to whether the patch set builds without new warnings or errors and whether the tests pass or fail. Verification is possible either by copy/pasting the checkout line on the front page of the topic, pasting into a local repository, building, and testing, or by looking at the output of the CDash@Home builds for a patchset. The Code Review score is a reflection of the reviewer’s reading of the code and indicates algorithm correctness, style compliance, test coverage, etc.

Rating descriptions:

Verified

+1

Everything builds with no new warnings or errors. All tests pass.

0

Build/test status of the patch set was not examined.

-1

Build warnings, build failures, or test failures occurred. Please remark on what was observed in the overall patch comment.

Code Review

+2

Everything looks good – ready to merge.

+1

Everything looks good, but the reviewer is not very knowledgeable in the given area, a thorough review was not performed, or another community member would likely have comments on the patch set and should give a review.

0

The code was not examined.

-1

Some issues were identified in the code that should be addressed.

-2

There are fundamental issues with the patch, and they either need to be fixed or the patch abandoned.

New Gerrit accounts by default not allowed to post +2 or -2 review. After a significant number of reviews have been performed by a community member, these priviledges will be added to an account.

Review submission

When ready to submit inline comments, hit the Review button on the topic front page. Next, enter the overall comments and Verified and Code Review ratings. Finally, hit the Publish Comments button.

When the comment have been pushed, the author will be notified of your comments via email, and you will added to the list of reviewers so that you will receive an email whenever a review is added or new patch set for that topic is created.

Video

See also

• Development Repository Setup