In addition to knowing the basic guidelines of contributing, there are some conventions and processes in use by the OpenLiberty project that are helpful to know for working in the repository.

Issues are intended to be the embodiment of the data related to a problem or intended change. The issue lifecycle covers from when the need for a change is found, up through when it's verified to have been completed.

A particularly important class of issues are those reporting problems in released code. These are important since they describe problems that could be encountered by a user with a stable driver. If a particular issue is being reported because it was seen in a full release (like 17.0.0.4, 18.0.0.1, etc. Not a nightly driver) OR if it can be verified that a user with a full release could encounter the problem, then this is a bug in released code or a "release bug". Accordingly, these should be labelled as a release_bug for further documentation.

While all issues should be descriptive, with these especially it should include:

• Version of the server the problem was encountered
• Instructions to reproduce
• Any error messages or stacks relevant to the issue