Merge pull request #547 from pilhuhn/pr-369

Provide contributions guide

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+# How to contribute to Kiali
+
+We'd love your help!
+
+Kiali is [Apache 2.0 licensed](LICENSE) and accepts contributions via GitHub
+pull requests. 
+Kiali does not require any contributor agreement to submit patches.
+
+This document outlines some of the conventions on development
+workflow, commit message formatting, contact points and other resources to make
+it easier to get your contribution accepted.
+
+We gratefully welcome improvements to documentation as well as to code.
+
+
+
+## Making a change
+
+The Kiali code base is split into several repositories. For the application these
+are:
+
+* Kiali : server part, written in Golang
+* Kiali-UI : UI part, written in Typescript, using the React framework.
+
+Bug tracking happens centrally for both repositories.
+Please open an issue before you make a change. 
+If you have an account at 
+[JBoss JIRA](http://issues.jboss.org/browse/KIALI), use this to open the issue.
+Otherwise open the issue on GitHub
+
+### Good first issues
+
+If you are new to contributing to Kiali and want to pick some easier tasks to 
+get accustomed to the code base, you can pick issues that are marked _good first issue_
+on GitHub or from [this Jira query](https://issues.jboss.org/issues/?filter=12336706).
+
+### Discussing changes
+
+For large changes it is probably good to first discuss them on the [Kiali-dev](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/kiali-dev) mailing list.
+
+### Developing
+
+The [README for the server](README#building) and the [README for the UI](https://github.com/kiali/kiali-ui#developing)have a pretty exhausting guide on building Kiali server and UI. 
+
+### Code Style Guide
+
+See the [Backend Style Guide](./STYLE_GUIDE.adoc) and the [Frontend Style Guide](https://github.com/kiali/kiali-ui/blob/master/STYLE_GUIDE.adoc) about getting your code in style.
+
+
+### Submitting changes
+
+Once the issue has been agreed upon and developed, you can send a pull-request. 
+
+The pull-request needs to contain a link to the issue. 
+Also for issues that come from Jira, the issue number must be present in the
+pull-request header like e.g.
+
+    KIALI-0815 Bump go version to 1.9
+
+The pull-request template will help you here.
+
+Pull requests will be reviewed by the team of committers and they will come up with 
+suggestions on how to improve the pull-request. You should be prepared to take that
+feedback into account, add further commits into the pull-request until the pull-request
+is eventually merged.
+
+## License
+
+By contributing your code, you agree to license your contribution under the terms
+of the [Apache License](LICENSE).