Make a Design Proposal

Many changes including bug fixes and documentation improvements, can be implemented and reviewed via the normal GitHub pull request workflow, which we have already introduced in the previous chapter.
However, when you come up with a new feature you need or expect MatrixOne to achieve, we encourage you to propose your idea and express it as a technical design document. Therefore, this page is intended to guide you to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the MatrixOne projects, so that all stakeholders can fully understand the direction the project is evolving towards. This page defines the best practices procedure for making a proposal in MatrixOne projects.

Before writing a design document

Making enough preparations ahead of the design document can promote your working efficiency and increase the likelihood of it being accepted. Oppositely, a rough and casual design document may be rejected quickly.
We motivate you to ask for help from experienced developers in order to obtain valuable suggestions to frame your design architecture or fill in details, which undoubtedly will upgrade the document to be desirable.

The most common channel for preparing for writing a design document is the Github issue. You can file a Feature Request or Refactoring Request to discuss your ideas.

Process

Generally, you can follow these steps to finish the whole process:

• Create an issue describing the problem, goal, and solution.
• Get responses from other contributors to see if your proposal is generally acceptable and whether or not you should make some modifications.
• Create a pull request with a design document based on the design template.
• Make conversation with reviewers, and revise the text in response.
• The design document is accepted or rejected when at least two committers reach a consensus and there is no objection from the committer.
• If accepted, create a tracking issue for the design document or convert one from a previous discussion issue. The tracking issue basically tracks subtasks and progress. And refer to the tracking issue in the design document replacing the placeholder in the template.
• Merge the pull request of design.
• Start the implementation.

Please refer to the tracking issue from subtasks to track the progress.