Reviewing a Landlab pull request

[mdpiper]

These are some thoughts on reviewing a Landlab PR that came from a discussion I had recently with @taranguiz. I hope others may find them useful. Perhaps they could even be applied more generally?

• Check out and install the feature branch of the PR locally
  • try example code
  • try example notebook
• Read through the code
  • open changed files in a text editor (sometimes easier for viewing than the diffs on GitHub)
  • try to understand what the author is doing
  • did they miss anything?
  • add comments and questions, especially if there's something you don't understand
• Look at the tests
  • do they test what needs to be tested?

When submitting your review, list what you've done so the author knows

I think a good review of a new or modified Landlab component should take 30-60 min.