DITA Open Toolkit Project Management

Project roles and responsibilities

The DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) project has the following roles: Project manager, committer, and contributor. Each role has different rights and obligations.

Project manager (PM)

The project manager is responsible for managing the project. The PM provides leadership to guide the overall direction of the project and removes obstacles, solves problems, and resolves conflicts. The PM works to ensure that the following goals are met:

• The project operates effectively.
• All project plans, technical documents, and reports are publicly available.
• The project operates using the open-source rules of engagement, which stress meritocracy, transparency, and open participation.

Committer

Committers oversee the quality and originality of all contributions. Committers influence the development of the project and have write access to the source-code repository. This position reflects a track record of high-quality contributions to the project.

Contributor

Contributors contribute code, documentation, fixes, tests, or other work to the project. Contributors do not have write access to the source-code repository. There is no limit to the scope of such contributions, though contributors who expect to donate a large amount of new function to the project are encouraged to work with committers in advance.

DITA Open Toolkit release management

The DITA-OT project works with an agile development process; it releases test builds via a continuous integration process, and it encourages feedback on the test builds while features are being developed. Stable releases are typically issued approximately every six months.

Each iteration begins with a meeting of project contributors. The meeting minutes are stored on the project wiki and are available to the public. Active contributors are directly invited to these meetings, but anybody interested in the DITA-OT development is welcome to attend. If you are interested in attending these meetings, join the DITA-OT team on Slack and request an invitation.

Each iteration kick-off meeting covers the following topics:

• Issues from the previous iteration
• Plans from each contributor for the upcoming iteration or for new work that will span multiple iterations
• Design discussion for any significant planned features or fixes
• Longer-term plans for contributions to the current or following release
• (As needed) Other project issues or hot topics, such as changes to the test and build process, interest from new contributors, etc.

The kick-off meeting for the final iteration before a stable build covers the following topics:

• Evaluation of what is allowed in the iteration; the final iteration typically has no major changes in order to assure quality in the stable build.
• Assessment of whether all release notes and other artifacts are up-to-date and ready for a final build.

When a stable release is complete, the distribution build is uploaded to the GitHub releases page, and the dowload links on the project website are updated to reflect the latest release.

Feature requests and defect reports

Feature requests and defect reports can be submitted at any time through the project page at GitHub.

The core project contributors track and address bugs reported against the project; they issue patches based on urgency. The core contributors also will provide feedback on requests for new features or design changes, but they might not be able to provide development assistance.

All new bug reports or feature requests should be submitted through the DITA-OT issue and feature tracker on GitHub.