Project Management

The people working on PUDL are distributed all over North America. Collaboration takes place online. We make extensive use of Github’s project management tools as well as Zenhub which provides additional features for sprint planning, task estimation, and progress reports.

Issues and Project Tracking

We use Github issues to track bugs, enhancements, support requests, and just about any other work that goes into the project. Try to make sure that issues have informative tags so we can find them easily.

We use Zenhub Sprints, Epics, and Releases to track our progress. These won’t be visible unless you have the ZenHub browser extension installed.

GitHub Workflow

  • We have 2 persistent branches: main and dev.

  • We create temporary feature branches off of dev and make pull requests to dev throughout our 2 week long sprints.

  • At the end of each sprint, assuming all the tests are passing, dev is merged into main.

Pull Requests

  • Before making a PR, make sure the tests run and pass locally, including the code linters and pre-commit hooks. See Set Up Code Linting for details.

  • Don’t forget to merge any new commits to the dev branch into your feature branch before making a PR.

  • If for some reason the continuous integration tests fail for your PR, try and figure out why and fix it, or ask for help. If the tests fail, we don’t want to merge it into dev. You can see the status of the CI builds in the GitHub Actions for the PUDL repo.

  • Please don’t decrease the overall test coverage – if you introduce new code, it also needs to be exercised by the tests. See Testing PUDL for details.

  • Write good docstrings using the Google format

  • Pull Requests should update the documentation to reflect changes to the code, especially if it changes something user-facing, like how one of the command line scripts works.

Releases

  • Periodically, we tag a new release on main and upload the packages to the Python Package Index and conda-forge.

  • Whenever we tag a release on Github, the repository is archived on Zenodo and issued a DOI.

  • For some software releases we archive processed data on Zenodo along with a Docker container that encapsulates the necessary software environment.

User Support

We don’t (yet) have funding to do user support, so it’s currently all community and volunteer based. In order to ensure that others can find the answers to questions that have already been asked, we try to do all support in public using Github issues.