General/Collaboration

Collaboration

Definition of Done

We suggest you use a Definition of Done for your project. This gives everyone in the team an understanding when a task is really done.

You can find the CorrelAid Definition of Done here:

GitHub - CorrelAid/definition-of-done: Definition of Done for CorrelAid projectsGitHub

General best practices

Those general best practices should help you with implementing the items of the Definition of Done.

How to document code

Documenting your code should always be less about the "what" and more about the "why". However, if you are writing code which might be a bit more advanced/complex, adding some comments about how it works is also useful, especially for the less experienced team members.

Peer review

Peer reviewing someone else's code involves three things:

1. test the code on your machine

2. provide feedback (possibly suggesting changes)

Whenever the skills of the team allow for it, you should use branches and pull requests for this. Pull request reviews are a great way to directly suggest changes.

If a team member is still quite new to Git, a file-driven "review process" (e.g. data_cleaning_jack.R) is also acceptable as to not overwhelm them with Git. You can leave comments in the file and commit it back to Git or discuss your feedback in a GitHub issue. Always be kind to team members with less experience.