Design Docs

Welcome to the design docs repository. This repo is used to coordinate around engineering design and risk analysis.

The design review process is important for sharing context and aligning on the future of the OP Stack in a public and transparent way. A good design doc will explain why a particular solution solves a problem well by explaining necessary context. It can include pseudocode and diagrams but does not need to be as specific as a spec, which should include all information required to implement the feature. It is important to include product perspective in the design review process, given we want people to actually use what we are building.

Contributing

Please use the templates found in the assets directory when starting a document. Place the completed document in the appropriate top level directory after it is completed.

• protocol contains consensus level features
• ecopod contains application level features
• governance contains governance level features
• security contains failure mode analysis documents

Design Review Sessions

The agendas for design doc review sessions are being tracked on Github here.

To schedule a design review sesion:

• Ensure that you have a pull request that has been reviewed async
• Open an issue and click "Schedule a Design Review" then fill in the information
• Ensure that a design review meeting has been added to the Public OP Stack Calendar

When choosing which stakeholders to invite to a design review meeting, it is good to tag people with high context of the components being modified or owners of interfacing components. Be sure to reach out to the reviewers and get explicit acknowledgement from them so that they can review the design doc ahead of time.

The goal of the discussion is to move towards closure, where closure is either ratifying or rejecting the Design Doc under review. This means that each discussion will end one of the following three ways:

• The doc is ratified, in which case the PR is merged and the decision is considered made.
• The doc is rejected, in which case the PR is closed with a comment explaining why.
• The team requests more info, in which case the PR is left open for discussion during the following week’s design review.

The agenda for a design doc review session is locked in 24 hours before the meeting. Each Design Doc must be reviewed asynchronously prior to the meeting. Comments on the PR are encouraged. Refer to the following SLA for required lead time between opening the PR and it getting onto the Design Review agenda:

• Short document (e.g., 1-pager): share a minimum of 2 working days prior
• Medium-length document (2-5 pages): share a minimum of 3-5 working days prior
• Long document (6+ pages): share at least 1 week prior