Contribution to {admiral}

This outlines how to propose a change to the admiral package. For more detailed info about contributing to {admiral}, and other pharmaverse packages, please see the Contribution Guide as well as other Developer Guides in the Articles section of the {admiraldev} website.

Please note that we try to align to best practices used in other R packages’ development processes - so veteran developers should be familiar with our processes. However, we do deviate slightly from some best practices and we advise all new contributors to review our package documentation accordingly.

Basics of Contribution

🦋 For each new contribution, the user creates an issue on the issue tab on GitHub to put it in our backlog. The issues can range from bug identification and/or fixes, enhancements to functions, documentation, tests or new features.

🦋 We advise you to contact us when an issue is created via Slack (If you don’t have access, use this link to join). We can discuss details or align expectations if you are not familiar with the admiral philosophy and programming strategy. The team will try to review the issues within the next backlog meeting and give some initial feedback. Since we are not a 100% fully resourced software development team it might be that some issues will take longer to respond to depending on the amount of overall issues.

🦋 We advise you to familiarize yourself with our programming strategy, guidance for GitHub usage and unit testing.

🦋 All newly created issues will be reviewed within the next backlog meeting and the creator will receive an initial feedback via a comment. Someone from the core development team will then triage new issues by assigning the appropriate labels (such as “user request” so we can easily identify new requests).

🦋 Issues are meant to be taken on by users from the Pharma programming community and not exclusively by the admiral team from GSK and Roche.

Contribution Model

Type 1: Contribution without Code

🦋 User creates an issue and ideally contacts an admiral team member via Slack.

🦋 The admiral core development team will contact the issue creator as soon as possible to discuss further details.

Type 2: Contribution with Code

🦋 First, the user creates an issue or comments on an existing issue to notify that they’d like to contribute code.

🦋 Follow our development process step-by-step guide.

🦋 We advise to contact an admiral core development team directly via Slack before submitting code for complex functionality.

Detailed Development Process

If you decide to contribute with code and you’re ready to make your first code contribution, this detailed development process step-by-step guide will help tie all the other detailed vignettes together to give you the simplest experience of helping to grow and enhance our codebase.

  1. Create a new feature branch from the main branch following the naming convention and pull the latest changes - as detailed on the GitHub usage guide.
  2. Familiarize yourself with the admiral programming strategy, and then make the required code updates.
  3. Before making a pull request, check the Pull Request Review Guidance & the following checklist of common things developers miss:
    1. Is all your code formatted according to the tidyverse style guide?
    2. Did you create/add appropriate unit tests?
    3. If you removed/replaced any function and/or function parameters, did you fully follow the deprecation guidance?
    4. Did you update the [documentation]https://pharmaverse.github.io/admiraldev/articles/programming_strategy.html#function-header-documentation)? If so, remember to run devtools::document() and include the updated NAMESPACE and .Rd files in man/.
    5. Does your code update have any impact on the ADaM template R scripts stored in inst/templates?
    6. Does your code update have any impact on the vignettes stored in vignettes?
    7. Did you update the Changelog NEWS.md?
    8. Did you build admiral site pkgdown::build_site() and check that all affected examples are displayed correctly and that all new functions occur on the “Reference” page?
  4. Once happy with all the updates, make a pull request to merge to the main branch and link the issue so that it closes after successful merging.
  5. Check that there are no merge conflicts. If there are any, fix them before requesting review. See solving merge conflicts guidance.
  6. Check the results of the automated R-CMD check and lintr checks and if any issues consult this guide.
  7. Assign a reviewer from the admiral core development team - this could be anyone you discussed the issue with previously via Slack or GitHub. If unsure, add a comment that the pull request is ready for review and add the @pharmaverse/admiral tag to it.
  8. Once the review is completed, the reviewer will merge the PR and this will then automatically delete the feature branch.

Finally, just a note to say from the core developers that we hugely appreciate you taking the time to contribute to admiral. Don’t be offended if during review we send requests back to you, as the expectations are high so that we can ensure the admiral codebase remains robust and consistent. The best way to learn here is always to jump in and get involved, so please don’t be afraid you’ll make mistakes along the way – we all have and continue to do so, and that’s what the reviews are for. Also if ever you get stuck don’t hesitate to reach out for support via the Slack channel. Welcome to our admiral community!