Version 1.0 created by Bill Snow and Scott Nicholas, adopted in ONOS board meeting held 17 June 2016.

ONOS Project Lifecycle

ONOS Project’s technical projects (“Projects”) shall consist of individual projects (each a “Project”), and each Project may have one or more modules (each a “Module”). The creation, maintenance, promotion and archiving of Projects shall follow a lifecycle described in this Project Lifecycle document.

The TST shall create, align and coordinate Projects and Modules. The TST shall have the power to reorganize Projects and Modules after sufficient review and discussion with the Projects and community involved. Subject to the foregoing, individual Projects can organize Modules within each such Project.

The TST shall encourage new Projects and innovation in the technical community. New Projects enter the ONOS technical community through a proposal (a “Proposal”) to the TST and if approved, are granted Incubation-state status. Any member of the ONOS technical community may submit a Proposal to the TST.

Any TST member may request the TST to consider promoting a Project, and, with respect to an Incubation-state project, the Project Lead of that Project may request the TST consider promoting said Project.

Any TST member may request that a Project be considered for promotion to Core or transitioned to Archived-state.

Projects shall change state following TST reviews. Projects typically change states independently from each other, but can cooperate closely and leverage each other’s results. Projects graduate from Proposal-state, through Incubation-state and Mature-state to Core-state. Archived–state is a Project state reserved for those Projects no longer being actively developed or used by the community.

Project state	Description
Proposal	Project does not formally exist yet, may not have real resources (yet), but is being worked on by the community to submit a formal proposal to the TST.
Incubation	Project has been approved by the TST, has resources, but is recognized to be nascent.
Mature	Project is fully functioning and stable, has achieved successful releases, but is not a required component of the ONOS Core.
Core	Project is a required component of the ONOS Core.
Archived	Project has been recognized as no longer being actively used or developed. This could be for a variety of reasons, e.g. project successfully accomplished its goals but is no longer used, project failed, etc., and has been archived as it's no longer a going concern.

Project state transitions

From State	To State	Review
<null>	Proposal	n/a
Proposal	Incubation	Creation Review
Incubation	Mature; or Core	Graduation Review; or Graduation and Core Review, in parallel
Mature	Core	Core Review
{Proposal, Incubation, Mature, Core}	Archived	Archive Review

Reviews

Creation Review

Proposal posted for two weeks, evaluated on metrics of:
- Name is okay (e.g. no use of a trademark)
- Project contact name and email
- Description is complete
- Scope and project plan is well defined
- Resources are committed
- Initial Committers Reviewers named
- Contributors have been identified
- Meets the ONOS Project’s policies (e.g. IP Policy)
- Proposal has been socialized with potentially interested or affected existing Projects
- Proposal email has been sent to the TST mailing list
- Review by TST: Confirm that the proposal is complete and the above listed requirements have been sufficiently met.

Graduation Review

It is intended that threshold for having projects graduated to Mature-state will be lower and the process streamlined relative to having projects graduated to Core-state.
Graduation proposal posted for two weeks:
Module owner named
The Project demonstrates stable output (code base, documentation, tests)
Active community working on the Project
History of successful, consistent releases in accordance with the release process
TST review

Working and stable code base exists
Active community exists
Project has demonstrated a history of releases following the release process and cadence
Confirmed acceptance and successful integration of contributions/code to partner/upstream projects.
Testing/integration environment defined and mature, tests and integration run successfully
Detailed documentation available documenting the code

Core Review

Core-state proposal posted for two weeks
The requirements for Graduation review are also met
Project is shown tbe viable, necessary or broadly useful module, subsystem or component of the ONOS Project
Project build and test scripts have been created to work with the rest of ONOS Core
Project shown to not break continuous development and integration environment
TST review metrics
Core review assesses projects based on the metrics of the graduation review and the necessity of the project relative to the codebase and user requirements.
In addition the project is required to have confirmed longevity (e.g. the project has been active for at least one year, participates in release activities, and has release plans outlined to stay active for at least another year).

Termination Review

Termination proposal posted for two weeks
States reason for project termination being sought

Termination proposal to include acceptable triggers for termination
(e.g. protracted idleness, or request by the project)