The Shark Development Environment

There is a number of tools the Shark developer team uses to ease contributing code and to ensure the code quality. The most important tools are described below in order to facilitate new members working with Shark, or external developers contributing to Shark.

Software Quality Management

The Shark library deploys a range of sophisticated methods and technologies to ensure a high level of software quality and to prevent from regressions. First and foremost, an extensive and ever-growing set of unit tests is available that reflects our approach of test-driven development. Moreover, a pre-commit review system is in place, and every check-in to the central subversion repository triggers a built-test-package cycle for all of our supported platforms on our continuous integration system. In addition, we continuously execute static code analysises to check for errors and to enforce our coding conventions.

More on the review system (ReviewBoard)

We use the ReviewBoard code review software. After getting an account on the Shark ReviewBoard, you are ready to post your files for review to the Shark developer team. We recommend using the post-review tool with the ReviewBoard system, since it greatly simplifies the whole process:

After editing and/or creating the Shark source files, you will need the list of all files you want to post for review, with their paths relative to the Shark main directory. You will pass this list to the post-review command (issued from the Shark main directory) together with additional options:

• Either only use the -o option to post-review. This should open a web browser window showing a menu which allows you to fill in important details for your review commit. Thus, your final command for posting your files for review will look like this:

  post-review -o path/to/your/file/one/relative/to/shark/main/directory path/to/your/file/two/relative/to/shark/main/directory
  

• Alternatively, and/or if the above fails to open a menu in the browser, pass all this important information to the post-review command directly. A good template is the following:

  post-review -p --summary='very brief summary' --description='a few lines of description as appropriate' --target-groups='SharkCoreDevelopers' path/to/your/file/one/relative/to/shark/main/directory path/to/your/file/two/relative/to/shark/main/directory
  

You can also make changes to your own review, a link to which will be mailed to all developers in the target group. For this reason, it is important to include the information on the target group because no mail will be sent if the group is wrong or missing.