Code Review Checklist

The following questions cover about 80% of the comments reviewers make on pull requests. Before submitting or assigning reviewers to a pull request to Drake, please take a moment to re-read your changes with these common errors in mind.

Does your code compile? :facepalm:

  • If your code doesn’t pass Jenkins, why are you asking for a detailed code review?

Is the code the minimal set of what you want?

  • If the PR includes more than 1500 added or changed lines, refer to Review Process for details on review size limits.
  • Do a self-review, before you ask anyone else to review.
    • Before you even submit the PR, you can review the diffs using github.
    • If you’d rather use reviewable.io to self-review, that’s fine too – just wait to tag any reviewers until you’ve finished your review.
    • As you update your PR based on review feedback, review your commit diffs before pushing them – don’t leave it to the reviewers to discover your typos.
  • Remove commented-out code.
  • Remove code that isn’t part of the build, or doesn’t have unit tests.
  • Don’t include files with only whitespace diffs in your pull request (unless of course the purpose of the changes is whitespace fixes).

Are your classes, methods, arguments, and fields correctly named?

  • Classes are UppercaseStyle and nouns or noun-phrases.
  • Methods are UppercaseStyle and verbs or verb-phrases, except for trivial getters and setters.
  • Inexpensive or trivial methods are lowercase_style verb-phrases.
  • Arguments are lowercase_style and nouns, and are single-letter only when they have a clear and documented meaning. (Yes, this includes single greek letters! A theta argument must still be clearly documented, even though it’s longer than one letter.)
  • Member fields are lowercase_style_with_trailing_underscore_.

Are you using pointers well?

  • shared_ptr<> usually means you haven’t thought through ownerships and lifespans.
  • unique_ptr<> and const reference should cover 95% of all your use cases.
  • Bare pointers are a common source of mistakes; if you see one, consider if it is what you want (e.g., this is a mutable pass-by-reference) and if so ensure that any nontrivial lifetime guarantee is documented and you checked for nullptr.

Did you document your API? Did you comment your complexity?

  • Every nontrivial public symbol must have a Doxygen-formatted comment.
  • If you are uncertain of your formatting, consider generating the Doxygen and checking how it looks in a browser.
  • Only use Doxygen comments (/// or /** */) on published APIs (public or protected classes and methods). Code with private access or declared in .cc files should not use the Doxygen format.
  • Most private methods with multiple callers should have a documentation comment (but not phrased as a Doxygen comment).
  • Anything in your code that confuses you or makes you read it twice to understand its workings should have an implementation comment.

Are your comments clear and grammatical?

  • If a comment is or is meant to be a complete sentence, capitalize it, punctuate it, and re-read it to make sure it parses!
  • If your editor has a spell-checker for strings and comments, did you run it?

Did you use const where you could?

  • A large majority of arguments and locals and a significant fraction of methods and fields can be made const. This improves compile-time error checking.
  • Do all “plain old data” member fields have {}?

Did you use a C-style cast by accident?

  • You usually want static_cast<To>(from).
  • To cast to superclasses or subclasses, dynamic_cast<To>(from); however if To is a pointer type then you must always check for nullptr.
  • You very, very rarely want reinterpret_cast. Use with great caution.

Did you change third-party software?

Changes to third-party software (e.g., upgrading to a newer version) are the most common cause of CI divergence between Ubuntu and macOS. For PRs with such changes, be sure to opt-in to a pre-merge macOS build.

Schedule an on-demand build using an “everything” flavor, for example:

  • @drake-jenkins-bot mac-arm-ventura-clang-bazel-experimental-everything-release please

Have you run linting tools?

Is your code deterministic?

  • Do not use Eigen::Random, libc rand, or anything like it. You can use libstdc++’s new random generators, as long as you call them using a local instance (no global state), and seed it with a hard-coded value for repeatability. This includes test code.