Working with Upstream Maintainership at Linaro

Owned by julianus.larson
Last updated: Oct 24, 2023
2 min read

If you are a maintainer of open source software and working for Linaro you have come to the right place. This work is very important to Linaro and data about the work is collected to use for marketing, member brochures, the company web page and to enable Linaro with members to be able to follow up on achievements. To be able to track the work done maintaining software there are certain things you must do. This page aims to explain the steps needed.

1. Locate the Jira project

The Jira project to use for this work is called Upstream Maintainership (UM) and can be found here. Use this project when creating the issue.

2. Create a Jira issue

For every maintainership you are responsible for you need to create a Jira Story. The story shall describe what is being maintained and shall be assigned to the person responsible for that maintainership (i.e. you). Please give the issue a good title so that it is easily understandable what it is for. You also need to put in an estimate for how much time you will spend on this issue, see below for further instructions.

In the component field you should set the component of the project you are maintaining. If there is no component for the project then leave it blank and contact the project manager who will add a new component.

The issue should be set to “In Progress” for as long as you are working with it at Linaro. If you stop being the maintainer or you leave Linaro the issue should be closed. Any other states are not relevant.

3. Estimate time

The original estimate time should be set to the amount of time you estimate that you will spend on the issue in the coming 6 months. Please update this twice a year if needed. Once in June and once in December.

4. Add comments

You should add a comment describing what you have done in the area of the issue since the last time you commented. This should not be for every small detail, but a cadence between a week and a month is reasonable.

5. Other issue types

In this project you can also use Epics and subtasks. Epics can be used to group maintainerships that are connected to find them more easily and subtasks can be used for specific tasks performed within the bounds of the maintainership. Previously initiatives have been used and there may be some left, but please stick to Epics, Stories and Subtasks.

6. What should not be in the UM project

  1. Do not dump cards that are left from finished Linaro projects in UM. They are not maintainerships.

  2. A story in UM shall not have an end date. The story is closed when the assigned person leaves Linaro or stops being the maintainer.

  3. New functionality developed by Linaro shall not be in the UM project. This type of work needs explicit funding and should be part of some other project.