Quality Assurance of Code for Analysis and Research

This document forms part of the Quality Guidance, published by the Quality and Improvement Division of the Methods and Quality Directorate at the UK Office for National Statistics.

Contributing to this guidance

We welcome all constructive feedback and contributions.

To provide feedback or request new content, you can create an issue on this book's repository. Alternatively, you can always drop us an email.

If you'd like to contribute, please also create or comment on an issue to describe the changes that you'd like to make. This will allow discussion around whether content is suitable for the book, before you put the hard work into implementing it.

Getting started

Minor text edits can be submitted as a Pull Request using the "Suggest edit" button under the GitHub logo at the top of the page you would like to change.

For changes to anything other than lines of text, you should follow these steps to make the changes locally:

To start contributing, you'll need Python installed. If you sit outside of Quality and Improvement Division, the you'll need to create a Fork of this repository to make changes. Once forked, you should clone the fork repository to get a copy of the book. Then install its Python dependencies like so:

git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/qa-of-code-guidance.git
cd qa-of-code-guidance
pip install -r requirements.txt

Great, now you should have the dependencies, including jupyter-book, installed and be able to build the book locally using:

jb build book

Jupyter book will write the book's HTML content to book/_build/html/, so you can open index.html from there to view the local build. Run the build command after making a change to the text to update the HTML that you view here.

All content for the book is currently written in Markedly Structured Text, which is based on standard Markdown (.md) but allows use of "directives" for generating content.

We also require developers to conform to a specific Markdown style. You can do this by installing our pre-commit pymarkdownlnt:

pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
pre-commit install

Guidelines

When contributing to the book:

• Use plain English and active tense throughout
• Include only what the user needs to know
• Explain informative image content in text where possible
• Provide examples of good and/or bad practices to support your content
• Avoid duplicating content elsewhere in the book, link to the relevant section instead
• Take on feedback from users and other developers

Keep any content that is in early development under the early_development/ directory. Content that is ready for publication belongs under book/. All pages in book/ must be referenced in _toc.yml or a warning will be raised and the changes will not be published.

Reviewing contributions

We recommend getting all contributions peer reviewed. Before submitting, check the following:

• Spelling and grammar. Refer to the Government Digital Service (GDS) style guide for commonly used conventions.
• Text is as simple as possible. The Hemingway app can be used to identify readability issues.
• Sentence case is used for titles and subheadings
• All images have informative alt text
• Technical terms are explained the first time they are used
• Hyperlinks work and have informative anchor text (e.g. 'blog post on reproducibility' instead of 'this link')
• Where possible, test new content with a screen reader

Submitting contributions

You should create a new branch to collect related changes that you make. Once you're happy with any changes you've made to the book, you should raise a Pull Request (PR) to the main branch of the main repository. The source branch of this PR should be the fork and/or branch that you have commited changes to.

Publishing changes

Internal contributors can trigger a new release of the book.

Preparation

To create a new release and publish the main branch, you will need to install the development dependencies:

pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

Releasing

To create a new release, use the command line tool bump-my-version, which will be installed with the dev dependencies. The version number references the current year and an incremental build count.

For a the first release of a year, provide the year as the command argument, otherwise provide build.

bump-my-version bump year

bump-my-version will create a new Git tag and commit. If you're happy with the version increase, push these to the remote to trigger the publication, by running both:

git push
git push --tags