Duration: 33:28

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The life of an open source project depends on its community’s involvement.
If you feel your project could use a more streamlined workflow, this session is for you. Through a series of easily adaptable tips and best practices, we will show you how the Xtext team supercharged its contribution process.

Your project needs a lot to succeed:

It must be easily accessible and highly visible to the outside world, especially to get feedback.
The developer setup must be streamlined to give potential contributors a jumpstart.
The build system should be simple to use, so developers can test their contributions before submitting them.
The contribution process must be as painless as possible for the contributor and obviously for the reviewers and committers too.
To be honest, just a year ago Xtext was lacking in all of these areas. Although the source code was mirrored to Github, the primary repository wasn’t easily accessible at all. The lack of even a basic readme meant that potential contributors wouldn’t find a single clue. The developer setup was a painful manual process, documented in lengthy, outdated, and deeply buried wiki pages (aka, the place where information goes to die). Even the simplest documentation fixes required a multitude of manual steps and it was almost impossible to ensure everything was put into the right place.

Fast forward to today - and Xtext uses Github as the primary repository. Contributors can use the well-known Pull Request workflow to contribute changes. Jenkins test jobs can be started by just commenting on a Pull Request. An Oomph setup creates the development workspace in a few simple clicks. The documentation can even be edited online and is automatically synchronized to the website in seconds. Best of all, your project can use these techniques today!

Sebastian Zarnekow, Stefan Oehme