We welcome feedback from the user community. This document is intended to help guide users on best practices for becoming involved with OpenMDAO.
We encourage questions regarding OpenMDAO to be asked on stackoverflow.com with the OpenMDAO tag. The developer team monitors the OpenMDAO tag at stackoverflow fairly closely, so this is the best way to get timely feedback.
To report a bug, use the New Issue form
on GitHub, and select Get Started on the "Bug Report" option. The bug report template will guide
you through the needed information, including a description of the erroneous behavior and some
example code demonstrating how to replicate the error.
OpenMDAO has a formal process for proposing, discussing and approving changes that affect the behavior of the code or add new features. Such a proposal is dubbed a "POEM" and the process is explained in detail here. In short, you are asked to submit a pull request to the POEMs repository with a document (and optional supporting files) describing the motivation for proposed change, the desired outcome and the suggested API changes.
Code contributions to OpenMDAO are welcome, however all pull requests are expected to address an open issue. If there is no existing issue related to the code change you wish to submit, then one should be created via the New Issue form. New issues are usually associated with a bug report or POEM as described above, however you also have the option to submit an issue regarding an unexpected or undocumented behavior of the code or a problem with the documentation, testing or other related aspects of OpenMDAO.
In order for a pull request to be accepted, it must include one or more unit tests verifying that the new
implementation works while not causing any unrelated tests to fail. It must also comply with OpenMDAO coding
standards, which can be checked by running the tests in the openmdao.code_review module.
Our coding standards generally align with the PEP8 and
numpydoc standards.
It is recommended that you run the full test suite on your branch in your local development environment
before submitting a pull request. To do this, use the pip install -e .[all] command at the top
level of the OpenMDAO repository to install with support for testing and optional features.
Then run the full test suite using the testflo openmdao command to validate your changes.
By contributing code to OpenMDAO, you agree to make anything contributed to the repository available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.