IdeaLifeCycle

Life cycle of an idea in autotest

If you are wondering how to propose an idea and work through its completion (feature making its way to a stable release), here is a small schema of how we tend to manage the transitions between ideas and working code:

1. RFC email to the mailing list
2. Wait a while (2-3 days to get people to comment). It is OK when no/few people comment, you can't really force them to prioritize such discussions.
3. Open github issues according to results of discussion
4. Create patchsets that implement solutions to the github issues
5. Review, fix comments, resend, rinse and repeat
6. Patchsets go to the next branch
7. Next branch gets tested/scrutinized by automated scripts
8. If needed, more bugfix iterations to fix the problems
9. next gets merged to master
10. master at some point is tagged as a stable autotest release

Although it seems convoluted, no one is stopping you from starting to design and implement your feature, and sending it straight away to github/mailing list (start on step 4). The maintainers will have to analyze and make judgement calls of whether the feature fits the current state of project, reason why it is more advisable to check on the feasibility before starting to spend too much energy implementing things.