Skip to main content

Making a better contribution

Draft document
This documentation is currently in draft form. See the issue to find out how you can help.

These guides provide advice on how to make a better contribution in software development - they're our 'ABC' guides to software development if you will. Most of the advice here is not Moodle-specific, and applies to software development in general.

These guides won't tell you how to do any particular thing, like create a form, or call a web service. Instead, each one discusses a thing we do (writing commits or commit messages, or getting complex changes through code review) and talks about how to do it a bit better.

Looking down the list of articles, the common feature seems to be the point that software development is not just about getting the computer to do what we want, but rather that software development is about working together with other human beings, to develop our understanding about how the software does and should work. Humans work best together when they communicate clearly, and you can only claim to have communicated if the other person understood what you meant.

The 'A better contribution' guides are a work-in-progress and, in time, will cover topics including:

  • Better comments in code.
  • Breaking a big change into logical commits
  • Better commit comments
  • Fixup commits to help get big changes through review

If you have something to say, please add more.