SmartBear Supported
SmartBear is the commercial entity behind the PactFlow product, which is an enterprise edition of the Pact Broker.
As such, SmartBear has a commercial interest in ensuring the Pact ecosystem remains healthy, vibrant and commercially viable.
We wrote about this back in 2021.
In this article, we expressed the following "commitment":
As a policy, we commit at least 10% of our engineering time toward open source development.
In 2023, it is clear that:
- that commitment is not enough
- the % itself is irrelevant
What really matters, is that the Pact ecosystem remains the best open source contract testing tool in the market and developers continue to adopt, use and love it.
As such, we are transitioning to a new model we are calling "SmartBear supported" that aims a little higher than simply a minimum resource allocation. We are still working on the finer details of what this looks like, however in the interim you may see some curious comments on Jira issues.
What does an issue with label smartbear-supported mean?
If you come across a GitHub comment that looks like this:
This indicates that a tracking ticket has been created in SmartBear's internal Jira, which we will use to prioritise and assign a team member to this task.
Think of it as a pointer to the real issue - the GitHub issue. All activity - including if/when the task will be selected for development, the solution, any timelines etc. will be made public on the ticket so there is full transparency with the community.
If you see this on an issue, you can sit tight and we'll update this ticket once we have more information on the next steps.
Can I work on an issue labelled smartbear-supported?
Yes! Having a smartbear-supported label doesn't preclude anybody else from picking up and working on an item, it just implies we think it's an issue worth addressing.