Input requested: how should we review hardware changes

[Peter Law]

Hi,

As you may be aware, Student Robotics will soon be more actively
developing the kits used by competitors for the competition. As part
of that we anticipate making improvements to our existing boards and
there are a couple of new boards which are being explored.

While we have a mixture of experience among volunteers around
developing boards and considerable experience in reviewing changes to
software code, it's not immediately clear how to review changes to
hardware designs. As and when the Kit Team is formalised, this will
likely form a part of their workflow, however as we already have some
PRs [1] up against our designs I wanted to get this discussion started
to unblock those.

There are a couple of aspects to this:
- what does the actual review process look like (e.g: for software I'd
check out the source, run it & poke it a bit, look for things which
need testing or will impact future maintainability, etc.)
- what does it mean for the master branch to be in a "good" state
(e.g: do we expect manufacture-level validation before we merge
changes?)

If there are branching strategies or testing tools which you'd
recommend, then it would also be great to hear about those too.

Do you have any experience in developing hardware designs and the
processes around reviewing them which you can recommend?

Thanks,
Peter

[1] For context: our current generation repos are now on GitHub [2] so
I'm anticipating that any process will use GitHub as the platform.
PRs: https://github.com/srobo/servo-v4-hw/pull/5;
https://github.com/srobo/power-v4-hw/pull/5;
https://github.com/srobo/motor-v4-hw/pull/4
[2] Hardware designs use the robot-hardware tag:
https://github.com/search?q=topic%3Arobot-hardware+org%3Asrobo+fork%3Atrue