Governance

This project is led and managed by a self-appointed project lead. The community makes up the additional roles of committers, contributors, and users.

Roles and Responsibilities

Project Lead

Brad Wilson is the currently self-appointed project lead for xUnit.net.

The project lead's primary role is to set the strategic objectives for the project, and communicate these clearly to the community. This includes collecting input from the community, working to determine which requests are of the highest value for the community at large, and working to resolve conflicts between competing needs.

The project lead is the primary point of contact for purposes of business operations including domain registrations, and technical services (e.g. code-signing).

Committers

Committers are contributors who have made sustained valuable contributions to the project and are now relied upon to write code directly to the repository. In many cases they are programmers but it is also possible that they contribute in a different role. Typically, a committer will focus on a specific aspect of the project, and will bring a level of expertise and understanding that earns them the respect of the community and the project lead. The role of committer is not an official one; it is simply a position that influential members of the community will find themselves in as the project lead looks to them for guidance and support.

Committers have no direct authority over the overall direction of the project. However, they do have the ear of the project lead. It is a committer's job to ensure that the lead is aware of the community's needs and collective objectives, and to help develop or elicit appropriate contributions to the project. Often, committers are given informal control over their specific areas of responsibility, and are assigned rights to directly modify certain areas of the source code. That is, although committers may not have explicit decision-making authority, they will often find that their actions are synonymous with the decisions made by the lead.

How to become one: Be appointed by the Project Lead

Contributors

Contributors are community members who submit pull requests for the project. These pull requests may be a one-time occurrence or occur over time. Expectations are that contributors will submit pull requests that are small at first and will only grow larger once the contributor has built confidence in the quality of their pull requests. It is expected that pull requests will primarily be in support of already opened issues with agreed-upon goals.

Note: before a contributor's first pull request is put into the repository they must sign an assignment agreement. The pull request can be submitted and discussed but it can't actually be committed to the repository without the appropriate paperwork in place. If the pull request is small enough, an assignment agreement may not be necessary.

How to become one: Submit a pull request. We'll evaluate the request to determine if it aligns with the projects goals. In addition to the goal alignment there is also a requirement to include appropriate tests and these tests run without failure. If all of the requirements are met we'll accept it and merge it into the project.

Users

Users are community members who have a need for the project. They are the most important members of the community: without them, the project would have no purpose. Anyone can be a user; there are no specific requirements.

Users should be encouraged to participate in the life of the project and the community as much as possible. User contributions enable the project team to ensure that they are satisfying the needs of those users. Common user activities include (but are not limited to):

Advocating the use of the project
Informing developers of the project strength and weaknesses from a new user's perspective
Providing moral support
Writing documentation and tutorials
Filing bug reports and feature requests
Participating on the discussion board

Users who continue to engage with the project and its community will often find themselves becoming more and more involved. Such users may then go on to become contributors, as described above.