Submission Group 03: gdphelperr (R)

Submitting Author Name: Gabriel Fairbrother Submitting Author Github Handle: !--author1-->@gfairbro<!--end-author1-- Other Package Authors Github handles: (comma separated, delete if none) @aldojasb, @ramiromejia, @gloriawyy Repository: https://github.com/UBC-MDS/gdphelperR Version submitted: Submission type: Standard

Archive: TBD Version accepted: TBD Language: en

Paste the full DESCRIPTION file inside a code block below:

Package: gdphelperR
Title: Summarize GDP Data and Make Plots
Version: 0.0.0.9000
Authors@R: 
    c(person("Aldo", "Barros", , "aldosaltao@gmail.com", role = c("aut", "cre")),
    person("Gabe", "Fairbrother", , "gfairbrother@gmail.com", role = c("aut", "cre")),
    person("Wanying", "Ye", , "wanying.ye2020@gmail.com", role = c("aut", "cre")),
    person("Ramiro", "Mejia", , "ramiromejiap@gmail.com", role = c("aut", "cre")))
Description: What the package does (one paragraph).
License: MIT + file LICENSE
Encoding: UTF-8
LazyData: true
Roxygen: list(markdown = TRUE)
RoxygenNote: 7.1.1
URL: https://github.com/GloriaWYY/gdphelperR
BugReports: https://github.com/GloriaWYY/gdphelperR/issues
Config/testthat/edition: 3
Imports: 
    stats,
    dplyr,
    readr,
    utils,
    stringr,
    ggplot2,
    vdiffr,
    testthat,
    tibble,
    rlang,
    tidyselect
Suggests: 
    rmarkdown,
    knitr
VignetteBuilder: knitr

Scope

Please indicate which category or categories from our package fit policies this package falls under: (Please check an appropriate box below. If you are unsure, we suggest you make a pre-submission inquiry.):
- [x] data retrieval
- [x] data extraction
- [x] data munging
- [ ] data deposition
- [x] workflow automation
- [ ] version control
- [ ] citation management and bibliometrics
- [ ] scientific software wrappers
- [ ] field and lab reproducibility tools
- [ ] database software bindings
- [ ] geospatial data
- [ ] text analysis
Explain how and why the package falls under these categories (briefly, 1-2 sentences):

This package is used to download, extract and format data from the open government portal. It also has a data visualisation element which is not listed above.

Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?

Data analysts, statisticians or any interested party looking to use data on historical GDP across Canada.

Are there other R packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ or meet our criteria for best-in-category?

Not with specific scope for this data.

(If applicable) Does your package comply with our guidance around Ethics, Data Privacy and Human Subjects Research?

If you made a pre-submission inquiry, please paste the link to the corresponding issue, forum post, or other discussion, or @tag the editor you contacted.
Explain reasons for any pkgcheck items which your package is unable to pass.

Technical checks

Confirm each of the following by checking the box.

[x] I have read the guide for authors and rOpenSci packaging guide.

This package:

[x] does not violate the Terms of Service of any service it interacts with.
[x] has a CRAN and OSI accepted license.
[x] contains a README with instructions for installing the development version.
[x] includes documentation with examples for all functions, created with roxygen2.
[x] contains a vignette with examples of its essential functions and uses.
[x] has a test suite.
[x] has continuous integration, including reporting of test coverage using services such as Travis CI, Coveralls and/or CodeCov.

Publication options

[ ] Do you intend for this package to go on CRAN?
[ ] Do you intend for this package to go on Bioconductor?
[ ] Do you wish to submit an Applications Article about your package to Methods in Ecology and Evolution? If so:

MEE Options

- [ ] The package is novel and will be of interest to the broad readership of the journal. - [ ] The manuscript describing the package is no longer than 3000 words. - [ ] You intend to archive the code for the package in a long-term repository which meets the requirements of the journal (see [MEE's Policy on Publishing Code](http://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2041-210X/journal-resources/policy-on-publishing-code.html)) - (*Scope: Do consider MEE's [Aims and Scope](http://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2041-210X/aims-and-scope/read-full-aims-and-scope.html) for your manuscript. We make no guarantee that your manuscript will be within MEE scope.*) - (*Although not required, we strongly recommend having a full manuscript prepared when you submit here.*) - (*Please do not submit your package separately to Methods in Ecology and Evolution*)

Code of conduct

[x] I agree to abide by rOpenSci's Code of Conduct during the review process and in maintaining my package should it be accepted.

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing: 1,5hour

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

Estimated hours spent reviewing: 1 hour

Hi team gdhelper! The package is well documented and well-organized. I attempted to run check() and everything works well. I just have some minor comments on the package as follows:

In gdpplotterr.R: there is a part commented out from line 30 to line 37. I just think that the document would look better to delete these unused parts.
I saw that in testthat folder, for tests of gdpcleanerr, each testthat code block uses repetitive data generation code. It will be great if helper data could be used to make the script DRY.
In the package site, I suggest the team should take a look at the part Reference which is about details of each function. The content of the first two functions is long, and the function introduction and demonstration of examples look a little bit messy.
I did find the plot quite complicated and not easy to distinguish between provinces. Different plot for each province might be one approach.
It would be great if you can describe more where your packages fit into the R ecosystem.

Overall, these are all very minor suggestions and I find the package has a clear purpose and the functions are easy to use.

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing: 1.5 hours

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

Love the package! I think you've done a great job making it easy to work with data from the open government portal. I only have a few minor ideas for improvement:

In the gdpplotterr() function, I think it would be really cool if you could also pass in a vector of province names as an argument. This would easily allow me to get a quick glance at the GDP's of the provinces i'm interested in. At the same time It's a bit hard to read the current graph output as there are 11 different lines that show up.
Although there is a brief description in the README file, I think it would be super helpful to have an even more flushed out statement of need. ie even though it may be somewhat obvious.. what problem does your package solve? Why is it needed?
Overall really nice job on the documentation! I found it super easy to install the package and get started right away using the different functions. The only thing I noticed was that maybe the vignette could provide some additional context over and above just how the package functions work. For example, it would be great if it provided some additional information about what kind of data the package works on and where to access the data.
Even though the code is well commented, I think there are some areas where more useful (high level) comments could be given. For example, in gdpimporter.R, there is a code block from line 36-52 that I think could be made more clear with a useful comment at the beginning of the block.
Very small thing, but you could consider renaming your functions according to section 1.3 of the rOpenSci packaging guide. What this boils down to is changing your function name structure from objectverb() to object_verb()

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing: 1 hour 30 minutes

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

The function APIs are simple, intuitive and it's very easy to use if someone with no previous experience using this package wants to incorporate the functionalities provided into their work.
The function names can be improved by making them start with an action verb such as read.csv(), the words can be separated by _, and the function names need not end with "r" which is a package naming convention.
Good work in allowing the user to pick the statistics that they wish to explore with good defaults as part of the gdpdescriberr() function.
Though gdpdescriberr() function allows the user to pick the stats, it calculates all the stats irrespective of what the user wanted and then filters the results. This can be further improved by calculating only the stats that the user wanted.
Good work in extracting the global variables used in the source files into a separate file called globals.R.

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing:

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

Again, great work guys! The package is consistent with your other work and the descriptions of your functions are apt. The use of API to extract open source increase the reach of the package and its users.

Minor suggestions:

Slight changes in the roxygen2 comments could improve the readability of the file. This can be modified easily while working in RStudio by clicking on Style Active File under AddOns tab.
Using DRY principles, the length of gdpdescriberr.R can be decreased from 111 lines to ~70 lines. The variables used can be named using paste0 function or can be appended in a tibble to make a more concise function.
The commented code which is unused can be removed from the code gdpplotterr.R to decrease the code length.
If the choice of selecting Canada in gdpplotterr.R is deliberate, it can be mentioned in the function description to enhance consistency of the code with the documentation. If not, then maybe it can be passed as an argument to make the function more modular.
The vignette's homepage is directly the article describing the package function usage in details. It is done thoroughly and is exhaustive. I've seen our peers setting the README as the home page of Vignette which provides a brief description of the package. This could allow the user to dive deeper into the documentation if it is required.
Very minor grammar errors in the README such as the first line of usage is 'to import our package' which could be 'To import our package'.

UBC-MDS / software-review-2022