Engineering Principles and Practices

This document is an attempt to capture a shared set of values for the project. Many companies rely on Mesos as a foundational layer of their software infrastructure and it is imperative that we ship robust, high quality code. We aim to foster a culture where we can trust and rely upon the work of the community.

The following are some of the aspirational principles and practices that guide us:

1. We value craftsmanship: code should be easy to read and understand, should be written with high attention to detail, and should be consistent in its style. Code is written for humans to read and maintain!
2. We value resiliency: our system must be highly-available, stable, and backwards-compatible. We must consider the implications of failures.
3. We value accountability: we own and support our software, and are accountable for improving it, fixing issues, and learning from our mistakes.
4. We value design and code review: review helps us maintain a high quality system architecture and high quality code, it also helps us mentor new contributors, learn to collaborate more effectively, and reduce the amount of mistakes.
5. We value automated testing: automated testing allows us to iterate and refactor in our large codebase, while verifying correctness and preventing regression.
6. We value benchmarking: benchmarking allows us to identify the right locations to target performance improvements. It also allows us to iterate and refactor in our large codebase, while observing the performance implications.