.. _guidegeneral:

General Guidelines:
===================

.. _bestpractices:

Best practices in FOSS development
----------------------------------

* It is agreed that the development guidelines should remain very simple. The typical contribution workflow is to start a branch from the current master (in a fork for external developers) and the pull request is also made to master.
* New features must have documentation and tests. Some PEP8 requirements (with exceptions, which are described by project) must be followed.
* A need for a tutorial or template on how to properly log events inside a WPS and how to write WPS tests is identified.
* The release cycle for birdhouse is roughly 2-3 months, coinciding with the video conference meetings.
* There is a suggestion to clean up repositories that have a lot of obsolete branches. Deleted branches still maintain their commits in the history if they were merged at some point.
* It is strongly suggested that before creating a feature branch to work on, there should be an issue created to explain & track what is being done for that feature.

.. _contribution:

Contribution Workflow
---------------------
The Birdhouse project openly welcomes contributions (bug reports, bug fixes, code enhancements/features, etc.). This document will outline some guidelines on contributing to birdhouse. As well, the birdhouse :ref:`communication` is a great place to get an idea of how to connect and participate in birdhouse community and development where everybody is welcome to rise questions and discussions.