Contribution Guidelines
There are many ways you can help GCentral. You think you're "not good enough" to lend a hand? This is nonsense. Our community only needs passionate people to be successful. Whether you are a end-user that can tell the community how you think GCentral can help solve problems, or you'd like to actively contribute to its development, there is a place for everyone's contributions.
GCentral's mission is to bring down barriers to collaboration between LabVIEW developers. The simplest way to achieve that is to help you easily find the LabVIEW resources that already exist out there. You can directly contribute to this endeavour by articulating those needs in words or by commenting on other peoples's suggestions. We classify this type of contributions as User Stories.
Before we start coding, we'd like to prioritize what features make the most sense for the community. The user stories are transformed into concrete feature requests.
Create issues and assign them the label "user story". It's easy to do:
- Go the the "Issues" page and hit "New Issue".
- Tell us about your idea. Here's an example.
- Assign it the "user story" label. This will help the developers classify the ideas into a story board.
When you comment on specific user stories, you're showing the community that you care about this issue. The more activity on an issue, the more likely it is to float to the surface and get implemented.
We can't code from user stories. They're great to give us an overall sense of where we want to go, and maybe prioritize the efforts, but we need to create feature requests to start working. You can help by turning those ideas into concrete actions. A single user story can develop into one or more features.
As a simple example, we turned this story into an action.
When you create a feature request, please try to assign it an appropriate label. For example, it could be a back-end, or front-end enhancement.
When we're satisfied that a user story has been turned into appropriate actions, we can close the user story and remove it from the Story Board!
Finding bugs, describing them clearly and fixing them are very important. If you want to get dirty into the code, please use a workflow compatible with ours.
There is no priority to bug fixes. All bugs need to be fixed. You can start with the ones that bother you the most, but you can also look on this board to see what are the highest priority bugs for the community.
You want to code new features? Sure, we have that too! Just like bug fixing, please use a workflow compatible with GCentral's. You can keep track of the back-end and front-end features and tasks on their respective "projects".