LAVA Software Project Contribution - Introduction¶

There are clear benefits to contributing to open-source projects like the LAVA Software Community Project. You may solve your own problems more quickly than working alone, and you may also have a positive effect on your favorite projects.

LAVA is complex and it can be hard to get started as a contributor. If this is your first time contributing to open source, there may be easier projects to choose. If you have contributed to a project before, the temptation might be to immediately start thinking about adding a new device to LAVA. Beware: device integration is the most difficult way to contribute to the LAVA Software Community Project. Our recommendation is to start slowly, get familiar with devices like QEMU or LXC first and learn how to design a Test Plan which suits your needs.

Before you start¶

Read up on LAVA:

LAVA Overview - especially Preparation.

You don’t have to install LAVA to contribute to the LAVA Software Community Project, depending on how you choose to contribute.

Read up on contributing to open source:

https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/

Ways to contribute¶

Some may believe that the only way to contribute to an open-source project is by writing code - fixing bugs or contributing new features. In reality, there are more ways to contribute.

Documentation¶

As you learn to use LAVA, keep track of where you notice gaps in the documentation. Most of the documentation is written by experienced LAVA maintainers and there are plenty of hidden assumptions. One great way to start contributing is to provide new documentation to fill in the gaps or help to reorganize some of the existing documentation to make it easier for new users to follow. If you experienced and overcame a challenge because the documentation was lacking, please get involved and improve the documentation!

LAVA documentation lives in the same repository as the code, in the doc/v2 directory. It is written using reStructuredText.

Issue Tracker¶

Get involved by using the LAVA Software Community Project issue tracker at https://gitlab.com/lava/lava/issues. To begin with, you might only create bug reports for issues you encounter. As you become more comfortable, consider triaging other bug reports.

Start by picking an existing issue and try to reproduce the problem in another system to which you have access. If you can reproduce it, outline the steps as a comment on the issue. This will save time for maintainers when they come to fix the bug later. If you cannot reproduce the issue, ask the reporter for more information. Triaging issues has a side-effect of helping you learn more about the project. This will come in handy as you contribute documentation and/or code in the future.

Bug Fixes and New Features¶

If you can write code, consider contributing bug fixes and, eventually, new features. There is a good chance that you have encountered a bug or two in the course of using LAVA. Contribute a fix for one of these bugs first; it’s very rewarding when you solve one of your own problems and see the change accepted.

Not all bug fixes involve new devices, Jinja2 templates or changes to the lava_dispatcher code. XMLRPC calls, general user interface issues, rendering issues in the Django templates and usability of the Query and Charts functionality would all benefit from more developer attention.

Contributing to the functional testing¶

The LAVA Software Community Project uses LAVA to test changes to the LAVA codebase as part of our internal Continuous Integration by running unchanging reference LAVA test jobs against the evolving LAVA codebase, using as many different device types as possible. As a long term project, it is important to get wide coverage of devices yet also to minimize changes outside the LAVA codebase.

Historically, this testing was done using Linaro’s staging test lab (https://staging.validation.linaro.org/scheduler/), a small lab isolated from the other Linaro LAVA instances. In order to broaden the range of devices which are available for functional testing, labs with device-types not currently available on staging.validation.linaro.org would be particularly beneficial.

To contribute, you need to already have a local LAVA lab with suitably configured, stable, devices and enough capacity to run extra LAVA test jobs for a few hours at a time. Test jobs would be run via a docker device on your master, using your devices with a docker worker using the latest LAVA code. This is a new area of LAVA development, and work is ongoing. If you are interested, please talk to us.

Mailing lists and IRC¶

Helping other people on the mailing lists or on IRC is another very important role within the LAVA Software Community Project.

Users need help across all time zones and the LAVA maintainers might not be around to answer, especially at weekends.
New users can particularly appreciate help from other new users. The LAVA maintainers can respond later to clarify any misunderstandings or fill in more details. Ask questions in the same way as on the issue tracker:
- identify if the problem being described can be reproduced
- is the problem already covered in the documentation?
  - if it is, is there a need to update the documentation to make the answer easier to find?