Update CONTRIBUTING.md (out of date)

[pdurbin]

We should update CONTRIBUTING.md for the reasons below.

Review issue labels and FRD folder (and process, generally)

Issue labels

The existing text and graphic is somewhat misleading because the public can not add labels when they open an issue. Specifically, the section on "Issue labels" is contained withing "Writing an Issue". Without any special permissions to the repo (as in the OpenScholar example below), this is what they see:

We should adjust the text and the image below to indicate to people that they are not expected to be able add labels themselves.

In addition, there are some new labels being created so we should probably mention them if they've been finalized.

FRDs, FRD folder, process, setting expectations, process, milestones etc.

FRD template

The link to the FRD template is out of date. We have a new template

FRD folder

Currently, the text says, "To review FRDs for Dataverse, you can access them in this Functional Requirements Document folder on Google Drive." Are we still doing this?

BRDs

What about BRDs? Should the text and image mention BRDs?

Setting expectations

Also, if you read the text in the image above, we seem to be setting the expectation that all ideas will make their way through the pipeline to the point where an FRD will be written. I don't think that's realistic. There are some ideas such as #1059 and #2280 that I'm not sure will ever become FRDs. But maybe there's no harm in leaving those issues open forever? A lot of project close issues as "WON'T FIX".

Community and Support

Should we continue to link to http://datascience.iq.harvard.edu/dataverse/support ? The latest iteration of that page seems to be http://dataverse.org/contact . There's also a page at http://dataverse.org/community/ (but see https://trello.com/c/1FWrobXU/8-community-page-updates ) and http://community.dataverse.org still exists.

Milestones

We really aren't using these milestones anymore so we should update this section:

• In Review
• In Design
• Candidate for version x

Attachments

GitHub now supports more than just images as attachments: https://github.com/blog/2061-attach-files-to-comments

We should probably update https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/blob/v4.1/CONTRIBUTING.md#issue-attachments since it's out of date, saying, "This file must be a supported image format such as PNG, GIF or JPG."

[pdurbin]

I just made a variety of improvements in b622805 in a new branch called 2594-contributing.

@eaquigley @posixeleni @mheppler @scolapasta please coordinate who will make the next changes in that branch. There's still a lot to do in the area of issue labels, milestones, process, etc. as I've explained in the description of this issue.

I'm going to unassign myself to avoid merge conflicts. Whoever wants to take the next swing at this, please assign yourself. Again, please push changes to the 2594-contributing branch. This will eventually become a pull request.

[pdurbin]

@shlake just asked about status of issues so we should probably make sure we explain in CONTRIBUTING.md the "Status" labels we're using now. As of this writing here are the Status labels from https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/labels

[pdurbin]

A new set of labels has been announced: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/dataverse-community/eq5aWkLbZ24/E7d7VqwoIwAJ

[djbrooke]

Yesterday, I presented a new process to the IQSS Dataverse Team. There was some good discussion and we'll absolutely be changing the way that we work and the contributing.md doc will be changed to reflect this process.

I'll update this issue (as well as various other places) as the changes are implemented.

[pdurbin]

Last week @djbrooke and I figured out the magic string to add to pull requests to associate them with GitHub issues at https://waffle.io/IQSS/dataverse . For example, I just added This work connects to #3384. to the bottom of the description of #3386. We should update https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/blob/develop/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md to include this magic string so people can easily make use of it while making pull requests (and maybe add a comment above to explain what it's there for. While we're in PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md we should probably remove any references to FRDs since we aren't writing FRDs these days.

[pdurbin]

Yesterday @djbrooke and agreed to create a "low-hanging-fruit" label ( https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/labels/low-hanging-fruit ) and like all other labels, it should be described in CONTRIBUTING.md. Here's how I would describe it:

low-hanging-fruit: issues that are good candidates for a new contributor because the change required is not great or doesn't require a deep knowledge of the code

We also discussed another label I'd like to add called "mentoring-available". I'm happy to mentor new contributors on certain issues, for example, and I assume other developers would be happy to as well.

[pdurbin]

I just created pull request #3730 and put it in Code Review at https://waffle.io/IQSS/dataverse