Ethereum is a mission critical system, the long-term sustainability of which requires strict engineering practices over rock-star development. Part of that effort is ensuring we have well defined processes that all ecosystem participants understand, agree with and adhere to. Everyone hates checklists, but Ethereum will only reach its potential if we can regulate it with the gravity of flight engineering.
This repository contains a collection of Ethereum Engineering Processes (EEPs), describing how certain repetitive but hard tasks take place within the ecosystem. Beside existing to guarantee reliability, the goals of these documents are:
- To lower the bar of entry for new participants, who might not be fully aware of implicit processes within the community. It also permits the new entrants to know in advance what is expected of them software, infrastructure and participation wise.
- Having complex workflows commonly agreed upon and well documented reduces friction between participants, because you can always blame the document for a requirement, opposed to blaming people.
- Maintaining the process documents long term allows for a whole suite of post mortems to be aggregated and analyzed when proposing updates. This ensures that quality rises as time passes.
Note, this is a repository for Ethereum Engineering Processes, not Ethereum Bureaucratic Processes. Document everything that's genuinely needed (i.e. affects multiple people across teams and organizations), but nothing more.