Thank you for your interest in helping us to make this Maven Plugin better!

Goal of This Document

This document aims at answering all the questions potential contributors to the plugin might have before feeling ready to get started.

What Kind of Contributions can I Make?

Contributing Code

If you are a programmer and want to help us improve the implementation, test cases or design of the plugin please create a branch of the current main branch of the plugin using git and make your changes on that branch.

Then please create a pull request and ask for a review by one of the core team members (e.g. redcatbear or kaklakariada). The reviewers will either ask you to incorporate their review findings, or if there are none, they will merge your branch.

AI Assisted Coding

We accept contributions that were written with the assistance of AI coding agents. If you rely heavily on AI assistance, please include a note in your pull request explaining how you used the AI agent and what parts of the code were generated by the AI. Also, we expect you to review every single line of code generated by AI before you submit your pull request.

We do not accept contributions submitted directly by AI agents. A real person must always be responsible for the submitted code.

We also will not accept contributions that are clearly generated by AI agents but not labeled as such.

Testing

We are happy if you test the plugin! While we do a great deal of testing ourselves, we want the plugin to be as portable as possible. So it is especially helpful for us if you test on a platform that we don't have.

If you find a bug, please let us know by writing an issue ticket. There is a template for bug tickets that helps you provide all the information that we need to reproduce and tackle the bug you found.

If you are a programmer, a code contribution in form of an automatic unit test case would be most appreciated, since this will make reproduction of the issue easier and prevent future regressions.

Contributing to the User Guide

Maybe you are good at explaining how to use the plugin to end users? Help us improve the user guide!

Ideas

Last but not least, if you have ideas for ways to improve or extend the plugin, feel free to write a feature request.

Style Guides

We want the plugin to have a professional and uniform coding style. Formatter rules for Eclipse are part of the project. If you use a different editor, please make sure to match the current code formatting.

We develop the code following the principles described in Robert C. Martin's book "Clean Code" as our guideline for designing and organizing the code.