Incubation Process

Inspired by Apache, via Globus

Nomenclature

The JA-SIG Incubation Working Group

The JA-SIG Incubation Working Group will oversee the process through which new projects move from a Candidate Project to an accepted Incubated Project, through review, to a fully sponsored project. The JIWG is responsible for

• assisting proposed projects in conforming to JA-SIG guidelines
• assigning a Project Mentor, a member of the community assigned to help the Incubated Project reach acceptance
• evaluating progress of the Incubated Project on a regular (quarterly?) basis and recommending escalation to a sponsored project, continued support, or retirement, according to established criteria

Process

This process describes how a candidate project would progress from submission to full acceptance as a JA-SIG Project.

1. Incubation Requested

A Candidate project is proposed to the Incubation WG via a proposal sent to incubation@ja-sig.org which contains basic information, and answers the following set of qualifying questions:

1. A proposed name for the project
2. The short preface for the mailing lists, if this project is accepted (*-dev, *-user, etc)
3. A proposed Project Lead, with contact information
4. A list of the proposed initial committers for the project
5. An overview of the aims of the project
6. A technology overview
7. An overview of any current user base or user community
8. An overview of how the project relates to other parts of JA-SIG
9. A summary of why the project would enhance and benefit higher education
10. A pointer to any current information (for example, an existing Web page) for the project

This proposal would be expected to be less than 3 pages in length.

2. Review of Submission

The Incubation WG (and possibly the JA-SIG Board)

1. Discuss the project
2. Vote on its acceptability

3. Acceptance as a Project under Incubation

Once a project has been accepted for incubation, JA-SIG would then:

1. Accept the project, which officially becomes a candidate project in incubation under the auspices of JA-SIG
2. Nominate a Mentor for the project, typically a JA-SIG community stakeholder who will act as a bridge between the JIWG and the project (mentor would also then serve as a member of the Incubation WG)
3. Assist the candidate project in the initial start-up to use the JA-SIG resources like SVN, Wiki, Issue Tracker, and mailing lists
4. Assist the candidate project in performing appropriate licensing, contribution, trademark, and other legal arrangements

The candidate project would now also be free to:

1. Indicate that the project is in incubation (though not yet fully sponsored/supported by JA-SIG)
2. Display the JA-SIG logo to indicate affiliation
3. Use JA-SIG infrastructure for development and collaboration

Note: Releases of projects in incubation are not officially endorsed by JA-SIG

The minimum requirements that a project must meet to exit the state of incubation (and should be working on fulfilling as part of the incubation process) are:

Legal

• All code properly licensed
• No non-licensed or license-incompatible dependencies in the code base;
• Software license grant complete;
• Contributor License Agreements on file (both individual and corporate agreement);
• Copyright agreement in all source files
• Check of project name for trademark issues.
  * JS: trademark registration for project name help by JA-SIG

Community

• Demonstrate an active and diverse development community. Preferably the list of original committers will have grown beyond the original set (and institution) in the proposal, but this is not a requirement.
• Demonstrate that the project has a reasonable expectation for support in the future, for example, if any single contributor leaves the project continued support will exist;
• The above implies that new committers are admitted according to JA-SIG practices;

Governance

• A project steering committee has been created to oversee the project or the project committers and an existing steering commitee agree that an existing steering committee will steer the project.
• JA-SIG voting practices have been adopted and are standard practice
• The project can articulate instances of having weathered and resolved conflict. Good-natured and well-meaning disagreement of vision, requirements, and implementation are a reality of community source development. JA-SIG desires that incubated projects work through these "growing pains", as the software is developed and additional committers and adopters become involved, before emerging from incubation. Incubation provides an opportunity to face conflict with the assistance of an Incubation Mentor and the support of the Incubation Working Group. [ JS: this seems too hard to quantify to be particularly useful ]
• Release plans are developed and executed in public by the committers
  • At least one release has occurred during the Incubation process.
  • Engagement by the incubated community with the larger JA-SIG community [ JS: also unsure about this – how do we define engagement? It certainly seems reasonable to have basically independent projects ]

Alignment & Synergy

• Use of other JA-SIG projects [ JS: use seems to strong. and, given point below unneccary ]
• Develop synergistic relationship with other JA-SIG projects

Infrastructure

• SVN module has been created on JA-SIG server
• Three required mailing lists have been used
• Issue tracker is being used (JIRA)
• Roadmap for project is present in Confluence
• Project website is current
• All non-sensitive (i.e. passwords, etc) information in the above tools is publicly accessible

4. Periodic Review

Projects in incubation will undergo periodic reviews (at least quarterly) which may have one of four outcomes:

1. The project will be promoted into a fully sponsored JA-SIG project
2. The project will remain in Incubation
3. The project will be asked to hibernate after a period of little activity (it may move out of hibernation at a later date)
4. The project will be asked to retire due to lack of progress

5. Promotion to full-fledged product

Notes

A sandbox or "contrib." environment may also be made available to projects before entering a Candidate phase.  This is a less formal status than Candidate.  Projects in contrib. may be put there to share with the community and garner support and participation.  Contrib projects may be nominated to enter incubation, at which point the formal incubator acceptance criteria would be applied. Projects may also be nominated to enter incubation from outside contrib, or during project formation. In other words, a presence in contrib is not a pre-requisite to becoming an incubation candidate, not is progress towards incubation necessary for contributions into the contrib area.