Milestone Deliverables Guidelines

These are the guidelines to be followed for milestones submitted for evaluation.

Submission

For the General Grants program, please submit your milestones by email to grants@web3.foundation. For the Open Grants program, please submit your milestones via PR to the Grant Milestone Delivery repository.

Content

The submission should contain the following information:

Name of the grant project
Link to the open-source code/delivery
License
Documentation
Formatted code, according to a set of guidelines
Testing Guide
A list of the milestone deliverables
Any additional information

License

In order to successfully receive grant funding for your application it is necessary for the project to have open source code. We prefer Apache 2.0, but MIT or Unlicense are also acceptable. If your delivery comprises multiple repositories, make sure to include the license for each of them.

Documentation

We value high-quality open source code, but even the most performant code is of little use if it lacks proper documentation.

We require that you document (where applicable):

API calls
Architecture overview and individual component details
Algorithms and protocols that are core to your project
Any other fundamental building blocks to your technology

Unless absolutely necessary, make the documentation public as well, ideally as part of the appropriate code repository. This will make it easier for the community to use or adapt your project.

Note: Only focus on your own contributions. Do not write detailed explanations of already existing components, e.g. IPFS.

Formatted code

A codebase that is easy to read is also easy to use. We suggest adopting one style from Day 1 and adhering to it across the entire team. This helps to keep the commit history clean and facilitates any reviews of the introduced changes.

For Substrate, we strongly recommend formatting your code according to the official guidelines.

For Rust, we encourage formatting any additional support libraries or helpers by following the Style Guidelines.

For any other deliveries, please commit to a particular style & let us know which official guidelines you adopt.

Testing Guide

We require that each milestone delivery includes a comprehensive test suite, consisting of:

A step-by-step guide demonstrating how your code achieves the milestones.

Please provide documentation on how to install, compile, run and test the deliverable(s). Make sure to include all necessary prerequisites. Common issues while replicating test results involve, among others, undocumented dependencies, version numbers, local database setups, breaking changes in the main branch since delivery, OS- and browser-specific incompatibilities.

Depending on the deliverable, this could include (but is not limited to)

how to embed your library in another application,
how to make example API calls to your service,
running your web app,and
steps to complete some desired action in your mobile app.

Unit tests

As with any quality software project, each logical code component should be testable.

Integration tests

We prefer dockerfiles to avoid problems with versions and dependencies.

Note: If you are not delivering code as part of your project, such a test suite is not applicable. This mainly applies to projects centering on design, research or hardware. If that is the case, please provide detailed instructions on how else we can test/run/replicate your deliverable.