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Types of Contributors

Engagement Levels​

ORCA has several ways to engage with the project and several different engagement levels. The various levels are explained below.

Advisor: Stakeholders that would like to be invited to demos and provide input on where the system is headed. This includes active engagement in the ORCA Working Group.

DAAC Integrator: Developers, engineers, and operators that implement ORCA into their DAAC workflows and Cumulus instances.

Contributor: Developers, engineers, and users who are not a part of the core team that actively provides fixes, enhancements, and features through code pull requests to the cumulus-orca repository.

Core Developer: Part of the core ORCA team that develops code and documentation for the ORCA components. If you would like to be a part of this team, please contact Darla Werner.

Requesting Fixes, Enhancements, and Features​

Feature requests and bug documentation should be done by filling out a Jira card in the ORCA Jira project. Please create a descriptive card on the backlog detailing the feature or bug along with the desired outcome for acceptance criteria. When possible, include contact information should the team have questions about the issue. Prior to creating a card, please verify that a card does not already exist in the project. If a card does exist, add a comment to the card so that the team knows the additional impact for the feature or bug.

All cards are prioritized and worked on in a normal 2 week sprint cycle that follows the EOSDIS SAFe timelines.

Providing Fixes, Enhancements, and Features​

ORCA contributors may provide fixes, enhancements, and features to the ORCA project. When making changes to code, ORCA follows a branching model similar to this git branching model.

In general, you must create a feature branch off of the develop branch, make changes on that branch, push the branch to the repo, and submit a pull request for approval. When creating your pull request, you will select your branch as the source and the branch develop as the destination. The pull request will give ORCA core developers time to review the changes and offer suggestions. All approved pull requests will be merged into the develop branch and be in a release at some later time. Feature branches should be named feature/[ORCA Jira Card ID].

Here is an example of creating a feature branch.

Creating a feature branch​

git clone https://github.com/nasa/cumulus-orca.git

cd cumulus-orca

git checkout develop

git checkout -b feature/ORCA-1234 develop

git push origin feature/ORCA-1234