Contribution Guidelines

Ground rules & expectations

Before we get started, here are a few things we expect from you (and that you should expect from others):

• Be kind and thoughtful in your conversations around this project. We all come from different backgrounds and projects, which means we likely have different perspectives on "how open source is done." Try to listen to others rather than convince them that your way is correct.
• Please ensure that your contribution passes all tests. If there are test failures, you will need to address them before we can merge your contribution.
• When adding content, please consider if it is widely valuable. Please don't add references or links to things you or your employer have created as others will do so if they appreciate it.
• When reporting a vulnerability on the software, please, put in contact with IoT Agent Node Lib repository maintainers in order to discuss it in a private way.

How to contribute

If you'd like to contribute, start by searching through the issues and pull requests to see whether someone else has raised a similar idea or question. In adition, you can also check in the IoTAgent Node Lib framework repository for issues and pull requests across all the IoT-Agents

If you don't see your idea listed, and you think it fits into the goals of this guide, do one of the following:

• If your contribution is minor, such as a typo fix, open a pull request.
• If your contribution is major, such as a new guide, start by opening an issue first. That way, other people can weigh in on the discussion before you do any work.

Pull Request protocol

As explained in (FIWARE Contribution Requirements) contributions are done using a pull request (PR). The detailed "protocol" used in such PR is described below:

• Direct commits to master branch (even single-line modifications) are not allowed. Every modification has to come as a PR
• In case the PR is implementing/fixing a numbered issue, the issue number has to be referenced in the body of the PR at creation time
• Anybody is welcome to provide comments to the PR (either direct comments or using the review feature offered by Github)
• Use code line comments instead of general comments, for traceability reasons (see comments lifecycle below)
• Comments lifecycle
  • Comment is created, initiating a comment thread
  • New comments can be added as responses to the original one, starting a discussion
  • After discussion, the comment thread ends in one of the following ways:
    • Fixed in <commit hash> in case the discussion involves a fix in the PR branch (which commit hash is included as reference)
    • NTC, if finally nothing needs to be done (NTC = Nothing To Change)
• PR can be merged when the following conditions are met:
  • All comment threads are closed
  • All the participants in the discussion have provided a LGTM general comment (LGTM = Looks good to me)
• Self-merging is not allowed (except in rare and justified circumstances)

Some additional remarks to take into account when contributing with new PRs:

• PR must include not only code contributions, but their corresponding pieces of documentation (new or modifications to existing one) and tests
• PR modifications must pass full regression based on existing test (unit, functional, memory, e2e) in addition to whichever new test added due to the new functionality
• PR should be of an appropriated size that makes review achievable. Too large PRs could be closed with a "please, redo the work in smaller pieces" without any further discussing

Community

Discussions about the Open Source Guides take place on this repository's Issues and Pull Requests and also in the IoT Agent Node Lib repository (Issues and Pull Requests) sections. Anybody is welcome to join these conversations.

Wherever possible, do not take these conversations to private channels, including contacting the maintainers directly.

Overview

Being an Open Source project, everyone can contribute, provided that it respect the following points:

• Before contributing any code, the author must make sure all the tests work (see below how to launch the tests).
• Developed code must adhere to the syntax guidelines enforced by the linters.
• Code must be developed following the branching model and change log policies defined below.
• For any new feature added, unit tests must be provided, following the example of the ones already created.

In order to start contributing:

1. Fork this repository clicking on the "Fork" button on the upper-right area of the page.
2. Clone your just forked repository:

git clone https://github.com/your-github-username/iotagent-json.git

1. Add the main iotagent-json repository as a remote to your forked repository (use any name for your remote repository, it does not have to be iotagent-json, although we will use it in the next steps):

git remote add iotagent-json https://github.com/telefonicaid/iotagent-json.git

Before starting contributing, remember to synchronize the master branch in your forked repository with the master branch in the main iotagent-json repository, by following this steps

1. Change to your local master branch (in case you are not in it already):

git checkout master

1. Fetch the remote changes:

git fetch iotagent-json

1. Merge them:

git rebase iotagent-json/master

Contributions following this guidelines will be added to the master branch, and released in the next version. The release process is explaind in the Releasing section below.

Branching model

There is one special branches in the repository:

• master: contains the last stable development code. New features and bugfixes are always merged to master.

In order to start developing a new feature or refactoring, a new branch should be created with name task/<taskName>. This branch must be created from the current version of the master branch. Once the new functionality has been completed, a Pull Request will be created from the feature branch to master. Remember to check both the linters and the tests before creating the Pull Request.

Bugfixes work the same way as other tasks, with the exception of the branch name, that should be called bug/<bugName>.

In order to contribute to the repository, these same scheme should be replicated in the forked repositories, so the new features or fixes should all come from the current version of master and end up in master again.

All the task/* and bug/* branches are temporary, and should be removed once they have been merged.

There is another set of branches called release/<versionNumber>, one for each version of the product. This branches point to each of the released versions of the project, they are permanent and they are created with each release.

Change log

The project contains a version changelog, called CHANGES_NEXT_RELEASE, that can be found in the root of the project. Whenever a new feature or bug fix is going to be merged with develop, a new entry should be added to this changelog. The new entry should contain the reference number of the issue it is solving (if any).

When a new version is released, the change log is cleared, and remains fixed in the last commit of that version. The content of the change log is also moved to the release description in the GitHub release.

Releasing

The process of making a release consists of the following steps:

1. Create and PR into master a new task branch with the following changes:

2. Change the development version number in the package.json (with a sufix -next), to the new target version (without any sufix)

3. Make sure all the dependencies have fixed versions (usually the IoTAgent library will be on master).

4. Create a tag from the last version of master named with the version number and push it to the repository.

5. Create the release in Github, from the created tag. In the description, add the contents of the change log.
6. Create a release branch from the last version of master named with the version number.
7. Create a new task for preparing the next release, adding the sufix -next to the current version number (to signal this as the development version).