How to Contribute

March 16, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

We'd love to accept your patches and contributions to this project. There are just a few small guidelines you need to follow.

Contributor License Agreement

Contributions to this project must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. You (or your employer) retain the copyright to your contribution; this simply gives us permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project. Head over to https://cla.developers.google.com/ to see your current agreements on file or to sign a new one.

You generally only need to submit a CLA once, so if you've already submitted one (even if it was for a different project), you probably don't need to do it again.

Code reviews

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

Community Guidelines

This project follows Google's Open Source Community Guidelines.

Development environment

Clone repo locally and install via pip:

git clone git@github.com:GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services-data-validator.git
cd professional-services-data-validator/

python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install .

Local Testing

This project uses Nox for managing tests. Install nox to your local environment and it will handle creating the virtual environments required for each test.

To run our local testing suite, use:

python3 -m nox --envdir ~/dvt/envs/ -s unit_small blacken lint

See our script for using nox to run tests step by step.

You can also run pytest directly:

pip install pytest pytest-cov pyfakefs freezegun
pytest tests/unit

To lint your code, run:

pip install black==26.1.0 flake8
black $BLACK_PATHS # Find this variable in our noxfile
flake8 data_validation tests

The above is similar to our noxfile lint test.

Conventional Commits

This project uses Conventional Commits to manage the CHANGELOG and releases.

Allowed commit prefixes are defined in the release-please source code:

User-facing commits

  • feat: section: 'Features'
  • fix: section: 'Bug Fixes'
  • perf: section: 'Performance Improvements'
  • deps: section: 'Dependencies'
  • revert: section: 'Reverts'
  • docs: section: 'Documentation'

Hidden commits (not shown in CHANGELOG)

  • style: section: 'Styles', hidden: true
  • chore: section: 'Miscellaneous Chores', hidden: true
  • refactor: section: 'Code Refactoring', hidden: true
  • test: section: 'Tests', hidden: true
  • build: section: 'Build System', hidden: true
  • ci: section: 'Continuous Integration', hidden: true