Guidelines and Procedures for Project Management - COIN-OR

1 Guidelines and Procedures for Project ManagementCoin-ORFoundationMay 17, 2007 Contents1 Introduction32 Responsibilities33 Contacts and Information44 Definitions45 Establishing a New Scope of Contributions .. Legal Documentation .. Project Classification .. Dependence on Third-Party Software .. 96 Contribution to an Existing Trivial Contribution to an Existing Project .. Significant Contribution to an Existing Project .. Substantial Contribution to an Existing Project .. Contribution of a New Subproject to an Umbrella Project .. 107 Project The Project Manager .. Regular Project .. Umbrella Projects .. 111 Coin-ORFoundationContribution Guidelines and Project Maintenance .. Tracking Project Submissions and Authors .. Code and Documentation .. Project Mailing Lists .. Project Web Page.

2 Bug Reporting Channels .. Periodic Review .. 15A Contributor s Statement ofRespect for Ownership16B Documentation of Ownership andLicensing for New Projects17C Contribution Check List For New Projects182 May 17, 2007 Coin-ORFoundationContribution Guidelines and Process1 IntroductionTheCoin-ORFoundation repository consists of a variety of independently managed open-source projects of potential interest to practitioners of operations research, including stu-dents, researchers, and professionals. In order to ensure that the repository consists ofhigh-quality projects that are actively and effectively managed and to minimize theCoin-ORFoundation s legal exposure, these Guidelines and Procedures for Project managementhave been established by the TLC in accordance with the Repository Management Policyestablished by the SLB. Most of the Foundation s legal exposure comes from the fact that ourmission is to publicly disseminate intellectual property (IP).

3 A guiding principle for projectmanagers is to ensure that the origin and ownership of all significant IP associated with aproject should be established before being offered for distribution (or redistribution). Thisdocument, along with the accompanying Foundation policy document, provides a minimalset of Guidelines to ensure that the Foundation is in compliance with IP law and that qualitystandards are upheld. Project managers are encouraged to establish their own policies andprocedures to maintain high quality standards for their of this 2 lists individuals responsible for implementingthese Procedures . Section 3 lists useful contact information for easy reference. Section 4introduces the Project classification scheme and other attributes associated with 5 describes the Procedures for contributing new projects toCoin-OR. Section 6describes the Procedures for contribution to an existing Project .

4 Procedures for ongoingmaintenance of projects are described in Section 7. Required forms appear in Appendices Aand B. A checklist for new Project submissions appears in Appendix to this of this document is the responsibility of Members may suggest revisions or additions at any time. Sug-gestions should be sent to the chair of the TLC. The chair will assign a member of the TLCto evaluate the suggestion. The assigned TLC member will produce a recommendation foraction or no action on the suggestion, along with a justification. Both the recommendationand the justification must be approved by a simple majority of the membership of the decision of the TLC is final. Suggestions may be resubmitted, but resubmissions mustsubstantially refer to the TLC s response to all related ResponsibilitiesAccording the Repository Management Policy of theCoin-ORFoundation, responsibilityfor maintaining the quality and integrity of theCoin-ORFoundation repository is theoverall responsibility of the TLC.

5 These Procedures contain the implementation of thatpolicy, as interpreted by the TLC. Responsibility for implementing these Procedures andensuring that they are followed falls on two individuals appointed by the TLC for indefinite3 May 17, 2007 Coin-ORFoundationContribution Guidelines and Processterms. Thesubmission manageris responsible for determining the acceptability of newprojects submitted as candidates for acceptance into the repository. Therepository manageris responsible for ensuring that existing projects adhere to the standards described hereinand are classified appropriately. He is also responsible for controlling access to the Project managers are responsible for maintaining their own projects and for beingresponsive to any requests from the repository manager or the TLC. A guiding principle ofthese Procedures , however, is to avoid placing unnecessary requirements on Project managerswhile encouraging best practices by rewarding exemplary Project Management with increasedstatus conferred through the Project classification scheme (see Section 4).

6 3 Contacts and InformationThis section lists the email addresses and web page URLs that are mentioned in the remainderof this document or that might be helpful for getting additional contacts:Repository coordinatorvaries with pages:Coin- DefinitionsAprojectconsists generally of a collection of related digital files with a common of projects include collections of source code for building executable software,collections of data files comprising instances of operations research problems, tutorials, anddocumentation, among are divided into two classes according to the level of development activityand available support. Anactiveproject is a Project actively maintained with publiclyaccessible channels for reporting bugs or suggesting improvements. Anarchivedprojectis a Project without such channels and made available as is. An archived Project mightconsist of legacy software that does not build but is deemed interesting for historical , it might be a previously active Project that is no longer maintained.

7 It couldalso be software submitted to the repository by someone who is not interested in actively4 May 17, 2007 Coin-ORFoundationContribution Guidelines and Processmaintaining are also classified as eitherregularorumbrella projects. An umbrellaproject consists of a collection of related subprojects. Examples are the Cut Generator Li-brary (CGL) Project or the Open Solver Interface (OSI) Project . Active umbrella projectshave one or more overall Project manager(s), as well as subproject managers for each sub- Project . Any Project that is not an umbrella Project is containing source code are divided into five levels reflecting the status of the devel-opment of the Project : Level 1: Projects that are not yet functional, that cannot be built without specialtools, or that otherwise do not meet the standard for a Level 2 Project . Level 2: Projects that can be built following installation instructions using commonlyavailable tools and that do something useful on at least one platform.

8 Level 3: Level 2 projects that also have substantial documentation, tutorials, examplecodes, or other aids to enhance usability. Level 4: Level 3 projects that have versioning, a stable release, and a substantial unittest. Level 5: Level 4 projects that have a binary procedure for classifying projects is described in Section Establishing a New ProjectThe first step in establishing a new Project is to contact the submission manager. Thesubmission manager then delegates the task of reviewing the submission according to theprocedures outlined below and summarized in Appendix C to asubmission coordinator. Thecoordinator creates the submission status page for the submission and is then responsible forreviewing the submission and updating this information as the submission process submission coordinator is also the primary contact for all questions regarding the sub-mission during the process.

9 At the completion of the procedure, the submission coordinatormakes a recommendation to the TLC regarding the acceptability of the Project and its ini-tial classification. If the coordinator rejects the submission, the rejection is automaticallyappealed to the full TLC and can only be upheld by unanimous vote of members presentat a regular meeting of the TLC. The decision of the TLC is final. The Project managermay also appeal the initial classification, as detailed below. The following sections detail themain Procedures and criteria to be considered by the coordinator to determine whether aproject is acceptable for inclusion in theCoin-ORFoundation 17, 2007 Coin-ORFoundationContribution Guidelines and Scope of ContributionsTo be acceptable, the Project must be within the scope of the repository. To determinewhether the Project is in scope, there are several litmus tests:1.

10 Is the Project potentially of interest to OR professionals?2. Is the Project s goal to build, use, or otherwise support the development of open-sourcesoftware?Any Project for which the answer to these questions is yes is a candidate for inclusion intheCoin-ORsoftware repository. The term Project is interpreted broadly here. Usu-ally, projects of interest consist mainly of source code for software implementing operationsresearch techniques. However,Coin-ORalso welcomes contributions of data sets, tuto-rial material, and documentation, as well as projects supporting the development of openinterface and data transmission Legal DocumentationCoin-ORhas different requirements for contributions that form new projects and contri-butions to existing projects. In both cases, the purpose of the requirements is to balance adesire to ensure that ownership of any IP associated with the Project is respected, with thebureaucratic burden resting primarily on contributors and Project managers.