QUALITY_DECLARATION

This document is a declaration of software quality for the rcl_lifecycle package, based on the guidelines in REP-2004.

rcl_lifecycle Quality Declaration

The package rcl_lifecycle claims to be in the Quality Level 1 category when it is used with a Quality Level 1 middleware.

Below are the rationales, notes, and caveats for this claim, organized by each requirement listed in the Package Quality Categories in REP-2004.

Version Policy [1]

Version Scheme [1.i]

rcl_lifecycle uses semver according to the recommendation for ROS Core packages in the ROS 2 Developer Guide.

Version Stability [1.ii]

rcl_lifecycle is at a stable version, i.e. >= 1.0.0. The current version can be found in its package.xml, and its change history can be found in its CHANGELOG.

Public API Declaration [1.iii]

All symbols in the installed headers are considered part of the public API.

All installed headers are in the include directory of the package, headers in any other folders are not installed and considered private.

API Stability Within a Released ROS Distribution [1.iv]/[1.vi]

rcl_lifecycle will not break public API within a released ROS distribution, i.e. no major releases once the ROS distribution is released.

ABI Stability Within a Released ROS Distribution [1.v]/[1.vi]

rcl_lifecycle contains C and C++ code and therefore must be concerned with ABI stability, and will maintain ABI stability within a ROS distribution.

Change Control Process [2]

rcl_lifecycle follows the recommended guidelines for ROS Core packages in the ROS 2 Developer Guide.

Change Requests [2.i]

This package requires that all changes occur through a pull request.

Contributor Origin [2.ii]

This package uses DCO as its confirmation of contributor origin policy. More information can be found in CONTRIBUTING.

Peer Review Policy [2.iii]

Following the recommended guidelines for ROS Core packages, all pull requests must have at least 1 peer review.

Continuous Integration [2.iv]

All pull requests must pass CI on all tier 1 platforms.

Documentation Policy [2.v]

All pull requests must resolve related documentation changes before merging.

Documentation [3]

Feature Documentation [3.i]

rcl_lifecycle has feature documentation describing lifecycle nodes. It is hosted.

Public API Documentation [3.ii]

Most of rcl_lifecycle has embedded API documentation. It is not yet hosted publicly.

License [3.iii]

The license for rcl_lifecycle is Apache 2.0, and a summary is in each source file, the type is declared in the package.xml manifest file, and a full copy of the license is in the LICENSE file.

There is an automated test which runs a linter that ensures each file has a license statement.

The most recent test results can be found here.

Testing [4]

Feature Testing [4.i]

rcl_lifecycle has feature tests, which test for proper node state transitions. The tests are located in the test subdirectory. New features are required to have tests before being added. Currently nightly test results can be seen here:

Public API Testing [4.ii]

Each part of the public API has tests, and new additions or changes to the public API require tests before being added. The tests aim to cover both typical usage and corner cases, but are quantified by contributing to code coverage.

Coverage [4.iii]

rcl_lifecycle follows the recommendations for ROS Core packages in the ROS 2 Developer Guide, and opts to use line coverage instead of branch coverage.

This includes:

  • tracking and reporting line coverage statistics

  • no lines are manually skipped in coverage calculations

Changes are required to make a best effort to keep or increase coverage before being accepted, but decreases are allowed if properly justified and accepted by reviewers.

Current coverage statistics can be viewed here. A description of how coverage statistics are calculated is summarized in this page “ROS 2 Onboarding Guide”.

Performance [4.iv]

rcl_lifecycle follows the recommendations for performance testing of C code in the ROS 2 Developer Guide, and opts to do performance analysis on each release rather than each change.

System level performance benchmarks that cover features of rcl_lifecycle can be found at:

Changes that introduce regressions in performance must be adequately justified in order to be accepted and merged.

Linters and Static Analysis [4.v]

rcl_lifecycle uses and passes all the standard linters and static analysis tools for a C package as described in the ROS 2 Developer Guide.

Results of the nightly linter tests can be found here.

Dependencies [5]

Below are evaluations of each of rcl_lifecycle’s run-time and build-time dependencies that have been determined to influence the quality.

It has several “buildtool” dependencies, which do not affect the resulting quality of the package, because they do not contribute to the public library API. It also has several test dependencies, which do not affect the resulting quality of the package, because they are only used to build and run the test code.

Direct Runtime ROS Dependencies [5.i]/[5.ii]

rcl_lifecycle has the following runtime ROS dependencies:

lifecycle_msgs

lifecycle_msgs provides message and services for managing lifecycle nodes.

It is Quality Level 1, see its Quality Declaration document.

rcl

rcl is the ROS 2 client library in C.

It is Quality Level 1, see its Quality Declaration document.

rcutils

rcutils provides commonly used functionality in C.

It is Quality Level 1, see its Quality Declaration document.

rmw

rmw is the ROS 2 middleware library.

It is Quality Level 1, see its Quality Declaration document.

rosidl_runtime_c

rosidl_runtime_c provides runtime functionality for rosidl message and service interfaces.

It is Quality Level 1, see its Quality Declaration document.

tracetools

The tracetools package provides utilities for instrumenting the code in rcl_lifecycle so that it may be traced for debugging and performance analysis.

It is Quality Level 1, see its Quality Declaration document.

Direct Runtime Non-ROS Dependencies [5.iii]

rcl_lifecycle does not have any runtime non-ROS dependencies.

Platform Support [6]

rcl_lifecycle supports all of the tier 1 platforms as described in REP-2000, and tests each change against all of them.

Currently nightly results can be seen here:

Security [7]

Vulnerability Disclosure Policy [7.i]

This package conforms to the Vulnerability Disclosure Policy in REP-2006.