[PROPOSAL] - Standards, Docs & Explicit Policies Update

[Pushplaybang]

Scope

In order to effectively collaborate, especially with remote contributors, its tremendously helpful to establish explicit policies regarding issues, pull requests, contribution guidelines, processes, tooling and documentation.

Motivation

As a complete bitNation noob, I've been digging through the code a bit and docs to find my way around. I've found some docs, but it took a little bit, and looking through the issues, I didn't have a clear place to jump in or know their status or progress. To serve my own needs, and hopefully those of the current and future contributors I'd like to put forward a proposal.

Proposal

These are the initial items that have stood out to me, I don't want to stand on anyone's toes, and as a complete newcomer to the project, I absolutely may have missed something. Please provide feedback.

• add a .github folder containing issue and PR and issue templates to keep comms easy
• explicitly define git flow for the project
• Work against development branch and tag releases, only merge to master for production, use github to enforce checks and review on PR's
• Define releases as milestones to track progress, release goal, PR's, and issues
• Keep a changelog file in the repo
• Use semantic versioning (Don't know if we're there yet or if this has been implemented)
• Start to define standards for repo documentation
• Explicitly define policies for issue & PR acceptance, as well as peer review
• Separate out the code contribution guidelines included here into their own readme in the same repo and link to them.
• add expectations for test coverage to make sure we don't fall behind
• I noticed some stuff on Trello regarding tasks and a roadmap, is this active? if so we could add these links to the repo docs as well.
• consider an automated CLA see this
• agree to a common CI server, I'm partial to CircleCI, and I see we're using Travis here, Semaphore in another repo and no CI in others, agreeing on one platform would be great I believe as devops skills will be more focused, and easier to share.
• use Codacy for static analysis (also free for open source)
• define a standard interface pattern for NPM commands with consistency across repositories, testing, running, building and deployment
• use Wiki for project outlook and summary, and long-term documentation

Responsibility

This is clearly something we'd need to agree to as a community, I would be happy to tackle some of these, I know you guys are super busy at the moment, but its certainly not something I think any one person can do/should do and maintain on their own.

Expected Outcomes

1. More clarity about how and what to contribute on, what the focus is now, and what's coming up next.
2. Easier onboarding for new contributors.
3. foundation to ensure future code quality and maintainability.

[kentdahlgren]

Thanks man. We are working to provide clear direction for this and several other related issues, and this is a helpful start.

[Pushplaybang]

Re-ordered the proposal items with priority imo. Added items regarding git-flow.

[florianlenz]

@Pushplaybang I am working on such a document but it's more about having a common base through multiple projects https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wSzNJb--Lbd9RLKnvOZ8P9aK4UKVZ_d_dlYBFeaDxQA/edit

[Pushplaybang]

@florianlenz - fantastic! just opened a second issue that's maybe more relevant #28 before I saw this would love to discuss further and get cracking.