Committers Credo

• Product quality
• Stellar judgement
• Consistent participation

Some people have write access to WP-CLI repositories. These people are identified in the following teams:

• maintainers - Project leadership
• committers - Trusted contributors

This “Committers credo” is a living document. It’s meant to establish generally agreed upon standards for committers, and will continue to evolve over time.

Product quality

WP-CLI is a project depended upon by the entire WordPress ecosystem. This trust is earned by producing a consistent, dependable, and high quality product. WP-CLI committers hold product and code quality in the highest regard.

Practically-speaking:

• Given a choice between Good, Fast, and Cheap, we pick Good and Slow. Creating great software is a journey, not a destination.
• Product decisions are made in alignment with our core philosophy.
• Code review is an integral part of our development workflow. Pull requests need approval of at least one other committer before merging. If you’d like more than one code review, please don’t hesitate to request one. You can request a review from a specific person, or from the @wp-cli/committers team.
• If you need help with something, ask for help. Seriously, ask for help any time you feel like you need help. No sense getting stuck.

Stellar judgement

A great product is a reflection of thoughtful, deliberate, and considered decision-making. WP-CLI committers exhibit stellar judgement when making decisions on new features, fixing bugs, merging others' pull requests, and generally working on the project.

The basis of this decision-making ensures:

• New features fit within the scope and philosophy of the WP-CLI project.
• Bug fixes are prioritized, because bugs negatively affect the product quality.
• Pull requests include tests covering the scope of the change.
• Potential code additions are evaluated on their maintenance burden as well as their usefulness.

Consistent participation

Effective involvement with the WP-CLI project requires consistent involvement, clarity of communication, and a propensity to help others.

As a widely adopted project, WP-CLI has a diverse user base. Helping this user base has tremendous opportunity for impact. WP-CLI committers prioritize clearing others’ blockers over their own work, knowing this is a key contributor to a stable community.

Notably, the idea that "pending code reviews represent blocked threads of execution" can be applied broadly across all forms of collaboration. Prioritize providing feedback to others over your own work, if your feedback is blocking their progress. Request a code review for a pull request by assigning the @wp-cli/committers team for review.

Committer participation isn’t just committing code. Often, you can have a huge amount of impact by investing a little bit of your time into:

• Refining an existing piece of documentation, or drafting a new one.
• Helping a contributor with whatever is needed to finish up their pull request.
  • If a contributor abandons a pull request (e.g. no activity in two weeks) that's close to a mergeable state, you can perform any necessary cleanup by committing directly to their branch and get it over the finish line.
• Triaging issues by spending 5-10 minutes further diagnosing the report and commenting with additional information you’ve discovered.