Developer Documentation#

These pages contain the developer documentation for mantid. They are aimed at those who are modifying the source code of the project. For user documentation please see here.

Guides#

Developer Accounts: Details of the accounts required for developers.
Getting Started: Describes the process of obtaining and building the mantid code base.
Packaging: Describes the process building the user packages.
Architecture: Describes the architecture of the mantid libraries and applications.
Using Local Mantid Build in Other Projects with Pixi: How to set up a pixi environment to use a local Mantid build instead of conda packages in other projects.
Standards: Details of coding and documentation standards for the project. Includes specifics regarding algorithms.
Manual Testing: Details of manual and acceptance/smoke testing.
Doxygen Setup: Configure a doxygen build locally.
New Starter C++: Exercises for learning C++.
New Starter Python: Exercises for learning Python.

Development Process#

Development and Release Cycle: An overview of the development cycle.
Communication: Details various methods of communication used within the team.
Mantid Issue Tracking: Describes how issues are tracked over the project.
User Support: Procedures for User Problems to be tested and passed to the Development Team.
Mantid Git Workflow: Details the workflow used development with git and GitHub.
The Automated Build Process: Details the interaction of pull requests with the Jenkins CI builds.
Jenkins Configuration: Describes the setup of Jenkins system and how to add a new slave.
Release Checklist: How to perform a full release of Mantid.
Patch Release Checklist: How to perform a patch release of Mantid.
Technical Steering Committee: Overview of the role of the technical steering committee.
Design Document Guidelines: When and how to write a good design document.

Tools#

Tools Overview: Describes class_maker, valgrind and related tools.
Profiling Overview: There are a few different ways to profile Mantid code.
Mantid Timers: Describes different ways of timing Mantid C++ code.
Flowchart Creation: Describes how to create a flow chart with dot.
Visual Studio Build Impact: Provides a script to reduce the impact of Visual Studio on machine performance.
PyCharm: Describes how to set up the PyCharm interpreter, and debug python code (Windows/Linux only).
CLion: Describes how to set up CLion to build and debug using a Ninja generator (Windows/Linux only).
VSCode: Guide to using VSCode for C++ with Mantid.
Eclipse on Ubuntu: Guide to setting up Eclipse on Ubuntu
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2): Guide for setting up Ubuntu 18.04 and Centos7 as subsystems on Windows (WSL2).
Obtaining a Benchmark for Mantid Fitting: Guide for setting up an environment to perform a benchmark of Mantid fitting minimizers.
Conda Package Manager: Guide on how to use the conda package manager in Mantid, including tips and a pip policy.

Testing#

Running the Unit Tests: Details on how to run the suite of unit tests.
Debugging Unit Tests: Details on how to debug the suite of unit tests.
Unit Test Good Practice: Guidance on writing good unit tests.
Reviewing a Pull Request: What to do when reviewing an individual contribution to mantid.
Gatekeeping a Pull Request: Things to consider when merging a pull request to the main production branch.
Writing Performance Tests: A walk through of how to write a performance test.
System Tests: Guidance on working with the system tests.
Data Files for Testing: How to work with test data files in the mantid repository.
Testing Utilities: Helper utlities used for testing.
Running Sanitizers: How to run the various sanitizers locally.
Unittest Monitor: Monitor failing and flakey unittests from the Jenkins nightly pipelines.

GUI Development#

MVP Design: Gives some guidelines to consider when developing a new graphical user interface.
MVP Tutorial: A hands-on tutorial on how to implement a user GUI using the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern.
Qt Designer for Python: Describes how to use the Qt designer to produce GUI views.
Mockups with Balsamiq Wireframes: An introduction to mockups with Balsamiq Wireframes.
Mantid Icon Table: The currently used Icons in Mantid and what they are used for.
ISIS Reflectometry Interface: An example of a complex C++ interface that uses MVP.

Workbench#

The workbench is the new PyQt-based GUI that will be the primary interface for interacting with the mantid framework. The plotting is provided by matplotlib. It has replaced MantidPlot.

Workbench Documentation: The Index of the workbench specific files.