Test Review Policy

In order to encourage a high level of quality in the W3C test suites, test contributions must be reviewed by a peer.

The reviewer can be anyone (other than the original test author) that has the required experience with both the spec under test and with the test format and style guidelines. Review must happen in public, but the exact review location is flexible. In particular if a vendor is submitting tests that have already been reviewed in their own review system, that review may be carried forward, as long as the original review is clearly linked in the GitHub pull request.

To assist with test reviews, a review checklist is available.

Review Tools

All new code submissions must use the GitHub pull request workflow. The GitHub UI for code review may be used, but other tools may also be used as long as the review is clearly linked.

Critic

Critic is a code review tool that is frequently used for reviewing web-platform-tests submissions. Although it has a steeper learning curve than the GitHub tools, it has more features that aid in conducting non-trivial reviews.

If you want to use Critic to review code, visit the homepage and log (authentication is via GitHub). On the homepage, click “Add Filter”. In the resulting dialog, select the web-platform-tests repository and add the path of the folder(s) where you want to review code, e.g. / to review any submissions or XMLHttpRequest/ to review only submissions in the XHMLHttpRequest directory. Ensure that your email address is added so that you receive notifications of new reviews matching your filters, and activity on existing reviews.

Labels

Pull requests get automatically labelled in the GitHub repository. Check out the list of labels in Github to see the open pull requests for a given specification or a given Working Group.

Status

The web-platform-tests dashboard shows the number of open review requests, and can be filtered by testsuite.