Contributor Development Process

In order to develop code for the inspectIT a contributor needs to apply the following development process:

GitHub Setup

A prerequisite to work on inspectIT is that a contributor needs to have a working GitHub account. Please use the https://github.com/join page to create an account if you don't have one.

Once the account has been created, you should create a SSH key that you will use on the GitHub. Detailed information on creating the key can be found at https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys/.

Fork inspectIT project on the GitHub

First thing a contributor need to do is fork the official inspectIT repository on the GitHub. Each contributor of inspectIT has his own forked repository that serves for pushing the code changes contributor developed. The official inspectIT repository is located at https://github.com/inspectIT/inspectIT. In the top right corner you will see the ability to fork the repository. Note that you must have a user on GitHub and be logged-in to perform this action.

Make a local clone of the forked repository

After the fork has been created, a contributor should create a local clone of the new forked repository. This can be done by executing:

git clone git@github.com:username/inspectIT.git

Note that username should be replaced with your correct user-name from GitHub account. You can also copy the SSH clone URL from the forked repository page:

In addition to creating a local clone of the forked repository, we highly advise to add the inspectIT main repository as remote to your local git clone. This way a contributor can follow the advancing of the inspectIT master branch and update the work accordingly. Adding the remote can be done with (note that inspectit_main can be changed if you wish):

git remote add inspectit_main git@github.com:inspectIT/inspectIT.git

Implement changes & commit

Once you have the inspectIT source code via git available on your local machine, you can start coding and implementing changes. We advise that you check the Development Environment page in order to correctly setup the development environment. Please develop code thinking on Quality.

Your changes should be contained in one commit only. We will not accept any pull request containing more than one commit. If you development resulted in more commits, please use squashing option of Git to create a single commit.

The commit message should point to the JIRA ticket work was done for. The message should always be in the format:

INSPECTIT-xxx: Description of the changes 

It is allowed to address two or more tickets with one commit. If this is the case, then please use the following format of the commit message:

INSPECTIT-xxx, INSPECTIT-yyy: Description of the changes 

Check that the build is working

When you have finished implementing the changes it's advised to do a final check prior to pushing the code. This can be easily done by executing the build on the Project you have been working on. In most cases it's enough to run:

ant clean build functional-tests static-analysis

This would build the project (with your changes) and execute functional testing and static code analysis checks. You must make sure that no step of this ant build is failing and that build can be completed successfully. 

Create a pull request

When everything is set, you can push the branch containing the changes to your previously forked repository. If you followed all the steps from this page, this remote repository should be named origin in your local git:

git push origin BRANCH_WITH_THE_CHANGES

Once you pushed the branch, you can make a pull request on the GitHub. Please go to the forked repository page and click on Branches. There you will have a possibility to create a Pull Request for each branch that you have on your forked repository:

Once you have selected correct branch, you will be guided to the compare and confirm page. Please make sure that the base fork is  inspectIT/inspectIT and base branch is master (this should be set by default). Fill in the title of the pull request and description of the changes you performed (optional) and execute the Create pull request action.