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Contributing

First read the overall project contributing guidelines. These are all included in the qiskit documentation:

https://qiskit.org/documentation/contributing_to_qiskit.html

Contributing Qiskit IBMQ Provider

In addition to the general guidelines there are specific details for contributing to the IBMQ Provider, these are documented below.

Pull request checklist

When submitting a pull request and you feel it is ready for review, please ensure that:

  1. The code follows the code style of the project and successfully passes the tests. For convenience, you can execute tox locally, which will run these checks and report any issues.
  2. The documentation has been updated accordingly. In particular, if a function or class has been modified during the PR, please update the docstring accordingly.
  3. If it makes sense for your change that you have added new tests that cover the changes.
  4. Ensure that if your change has an end user facing impact (new feature, deprecation, removal etc) that you have added a reno release note for that change and that the PR is tagged for the changelog.

Changelog generation

The changelog is automatically generated as part of the release process automation. This works through a combination of the git log and the pull request. When a release is tagged and pushed to github the release automation bot looks at all commit messages from the git log for the release. It takes the PR numbers from the git log (assuming a squash merge) and checks if that PR had a Changelog: label on it. If there is a label it will add the git commit message summary line from the git log for the release to the changelog.

If there are multiple Changelog: tags on a PR the git commit message summary line from the git log will be used for each changelog category tagged.

The current categories for each label are as follows:

PR Label Changelog Category
Changelog: Deprecation Deprecated
Changelog: New Feature Added
Changelog: API Change Changed
Changelog: Removal Removed
Changelog: Bugfix Fixed

Release Notes

When making any end user facing changes in a contribution we have to make sure we document that when we release a new version of qiskit-ibmq-provider. The expectation is that if your code contribution has user facing changes that you will write the release documentation for these changes. This documentation must explain what was changed, why it was changed, and how users can either use or adapt to the change. The idea behind release documentation is that when a naive user with limited internal knowledege of the project is upgrading from the previous release to the new one, they should be able to read the release notes, understand if they need to update their program which uses qiskit, and how they would go about doing that. It ideally should explain why they need to make this change too, to provide the necessary context.

To make sure we don't forget a release note or if the details of user facing changes over a release cycle we require that all user facing changes include documentation at the same time as the code. To accomplish this we use the reno tool which enables a git based workflow for writing and compiling release notes.

Adding a new release note

Making a new release note is quite straightforward. Ensure that you have reno installed with::

pip install -U reno

Once you have reno installed you can make a new release note by running in your local repository checkout's root::

reno new short-description-string

where short-description-string is a brief string (with no spaces) that describes what's in the release note. This will become the prefix for the release note file. Once that is run it will create a new yaml file in releasenotes/notes. Then open that yaml file in a text editor and write the release note. The basic structure of a release note is restructured text in yaml lists under category keys. You add individual items under each category and they will be grouped automatically by release when the release notes are compiled. A single file can have as many entries in it as needed, but to avoid potential conflicts you'll want to create a new file for each pull request that has user facing changes. When you open the newly created file it will be a full template of the different categories with a description of a category as a single entry in each category. You'll want to delete all the sections you aren't using and update the contents for those you are. For example, the end result should look something like::

features:
  - |
    Introduced a new feature foo, that adds support for doing something to
    ``QuantumCircuit`` objects. It can be used by using the foo function,
    for example::

      from qiskit import foo
      from qiskit import QuantumCircuit
      foo(QuantumCircuit())

  - |
    The ``qiskit.QuantumCircuit`` module has a new method ``foo()``. This is
    the equivalent of calling the ``qiskit.foo()`` to do something to your
    QuantumCircuit. This is the equivalent of running ``qiskit.foo()`` on
    your circuit, but provides the convenience of running it natively on
    an object. For example::

      from qiskit import QuantumCircuit

      circ = QuantumCircuit()
      circ.foo()

deprecations:
  - |
    The ``qiskit.bar`` module has been deprecated and will be removed in a
    future release. Its sole function, ``foobar()`` has been superseded by the
    ``qiskit.foo()`` function which provides similar functionality but with
    more accurate results and better performance. You should update your calls
    ``qiskit.bar.foobar()`` calls to ``qiskit.foo()``.

You can also look at other release notes for other examples.

You can use any restructured text feature in them (code sections, tables, enumerated lists, bulleted list, etc) to express what is being changed as needed. In general you want the release notes to include as much detail as needed so that users will understand what has changed, why it changed, and how they'll have to update their code.

After you've finished writing your release notes you'll want to add the note file to your commit with git add and commit them to your PR branch to make sure they're included with the code in your PR.

Linking to issues

If you need to link to an issue or other github artifact as part of the release note this should be done using an inline link with the text being the issue number. For example you would write a release note with a link to issue 12345 as:

fixes:
  - |
    Fixes a race condition in the function ``foo()``. Refer to
    `#12345 <https://github.com/Qiskit/qiskit-ibmq-provider/issues/12345>`_ for
    more details.

Generating the release notes

After release notes have been added if you want to see what the full output of the release notes. In general the output from reno that we'll get is a rst (ReStructuredText) file that can be compiled by sphinx. To generate the rst file you use the reno report command. If you want to generate the full ibmq provider release notes for all releases (since we started using reno during 0.9) you just run::

reno report

but you can also use the --version argument to view a single release (after it has been tagged::

reno report --version 0.9.0

At release time reno report is used to generate the release notes for the release and the output will be submitted as a pull request to the documentation repository's release notes file

Building release notes locally

Building The release notes are part of the standard qiskit-ibmq-provider documentation builds. To check what the rendered html output of the release notes will look like for the current state of the repo you can run: tox -edocs which will build all the documentation into docs/_build/html and the release notes in particular will be located at docs/_build/html/release_notes.html

Installing Qiskit IBMQ Provider from source

Please see the Installing IBM Quantum Provider from Source section of the Qiskit documentation.

Test

New features often imply changes in the existent tests or new ones are needed. Once they're updated/added run this be sure they keep passing.

For executing the tests, a make test target is available.

For executing a simple python test manually, you can just run this command:

Linux and Mac:

$ LOG_LEVEL=INFO python -m unittest test/test_something.py

Windows:

C:\..\> python -m unittest test/test_something.py

Note many of the tests will not be executed unless you have setup an IBMQ account. To set this up please go to this page and register an account.

By default, and if there is no user credentials available, the tests that require online access are run with recorded (mocked) information. This is, the remote requests are replayed from a test/cassettes and not real HTTP requests is generated. If user credentials are found, in that cases it use them to make the network requests.

How and which tests are executed is controlled by a environment variable QISKIT_TESTS. The options are (where uc_available = True if the user credentials are available, and False otherwise):

Option Description Default If True, forces

skip_online Skips tests that require remote False rec = False requests (also, no mocked information
is used). Does not require user
credentials.

mock_online It runs the online tests using mocked not uc_available skip_online = False information. Does not require user
credentials.

run_slow It runs tests tagged as slow. False

rec It records the remote requests. It False skip_online = False requires user credentials. run_slow = False

It is possible to provide more than one option separated with commas. The order of precedence in the options is right to left. For example, QISKIT_TESTS=skip_online,rec will set the options as skip_online == False and rec == True.

Style guide

Please submit clean code and please make effort to follow existing conventions in order to keep it as readable as possible. We use:

To ensure your changes respect the style guidelines, you can run the following commands:

All platforms:

$> cd out
out$> make lint
out$> make style
out$> make mypy

Development Cycle

The development cycle for qiskit-ibmq-provider is all handled in the open using the project boards in Github for project management. We use milestones in Github to track work for specific releases. The features or other changes that we want to include in a release will be tagged and discussed in Github. As we're preparing a new release we'll document what has changed since the previous version in the release notes.

Branches

  • master:

The master branch is used for development of the next version of qiskit-ibmq-provider. It will be updated frequently and should not be considered stable. The API can and will change on master as we introduce and refine new features.

  • stable/* branches: Branches under stable/* are used to maintain released versions of qiskit-ibmq-provider. It contains the version of the code corresponding to the latest release for that minor version on pypi. For example, stable/0.8 contains the code for the 0.8.2 release on pypi. The API on these branches are stable and the only changes merged to it are bugfixes.

Release cycle

When it is time to release a new minor version of qiskit-ibmq-provider we will:

  1. Create a new tag with the version number and push it to github
  2. Change the master version to the next release version.

The release automation processes will be triggered by the new tag and perform the following steps:

  1. Create a stable branch for the new minor version from the release tag on the master branch
  2. Build and upload binary wheels to pypi
  3. Create a github release page with a generated changelog
  4. Generate a PR on the meta-repository to bump the ibmq provider version and meta-package version.

The stable/* branches should only receive changes in the form of bug fixes.