Part 4: Development & Technical Operations - ApertureViewer/Aperture-Opertations-Manual GitHub Wiki

Part 4: Development & Technical Operations of the Aperture Operating Manual (AOM) provides a deep dive into the technical heart of the Aperture Viewer project. This section outlines the specific methodologies, standards, and procedures that govern how the viewer is developed, tested, and released. It is an essential resource for developers, code contributors, and the Quality Assurance team, while also offering transparency into our engineering practices for all stakeholders.

Key areas covered in this comprehensive part include:

  1. Development Workflow (Aperture Viewer Specifics) (Section 10.0):

    • Details on our Codebase Origin and the nature of our Upstream Relationship with the Firestorm Viewer, including our policy on contributing back.
    • An overview of the Technical Stack used in Aperture Viewer.
    • Our detailed Git Branching Strategy (full details in Appendix L).
    • The process for Issue Tracking using GitHub Issues (full details in Appendix M).
    • Guidelines for the Pull Request (PR) Process, referencing the main "Contributing Code" Wiki page.
    • Code Review Guidelines, outlining the review focus and process.
    • Our specific Coding Conventions & Style, including the mandatory Aperture Commenting Style (full details in Appendix N).
    • The Strict Commit Message Guidelines required for all contributions (full details in Appendix O).

  2. Quality Assurance (QA) & Testing (Section 11.0):

    • The QA Strategy and Philosophy that guides our testing efforts.
    • An overview of the various Testing Types Employed throughout the development lifecycle.
    • The approach to Test Plan Development.
    • The Bug Reporting and Triage Process.
    • The Release Candidate (RC) Testing Process for final validation.

  3. Release Management (Section 12.0):

    • Our Release Cadence Philosophy, balancing feature delivery with stability.
    • The Versioning Scheme (Semantic Versioning) used for releases.
    • Step-by-step Release Preparation Steps.
    • How Release Installers/Packages are built.
    • The process for Release Publication on GitHub.
    • Post-Release Merging practices.
    • An overview of Community Communication of Releases.

  4. Code Maintenance & Security (Section 13.0):

    • Reiteration of the policy for Upstreaming Fixes.
    • Procedures for Handling Security Vulnerabilities.
    • Information on Code Signing Procedures and User Security, including the use of checksums.
    • An overview of Dependency Management.

This part aims to provide a clear, structured, and transparent view of how Aperture Viewer is engineered, maintained, and delivered, ensuring quality, stability, and adherence to open-source best practices.