OSS Collaboration Will Never Be the Same.
Tags: opensource, productivity, showdev, webdev
Published: 2022-04-14 14:57:30

###Livecycle is Now Supported on OSS Projects

We’ve got some great news to share - Livecycle now supports installation on open source projects, bringing the power of streamlined collaboration to project maintainers and contributors.

Let’s unpack why this is such a huge deal. 

###Livecycle = Inclusive Collaboration

With Livecycle, we’ve built a platform that makes teams deliver faster, even (or perhaps especially) when the team is remote. As companies become increasingly global and distributed by nature, we are empowering product-centric teams with inclusive collaboration, dramatically improving their ability to work “together” in a shared context. 

Our ability to provide PR preview environments that include a live, contextual collaboration layer has enabled cross-functional teams to work together more clearly, quickly, and effectively in an asynchronous manner to tighten feedback loops and ship their code. 

###OSS Workflow Challenges

The OSS community is similarly composed of maintainers and contributors working together remotely. But the current OSS workflow presents some challenges. 

Maintainers want to create awesome, impactful projects. But this comes with a lot of responsibility. Maintainers need to:

- Make sure the project is of high quality with minimal bugs and issues
- Make sure the project is ‘contribution-friendly’ with a good contributor experience. This means the project is well documented with a fast response time to open PRs or feature requests
- Make sure their efforts are appealing to the broader developer’s community through marketing efforts that generate ‘Brand Awareness’ for their projects. At the end of the day, maintainers are interested in efforts that will result in: more stargazers, more forks, coverage by technical publications, more community members, adoption by commercial companies and donations to the project (via Open Collective or similar platforms)

And so, it’s clear that the relationship between maintainers, contributors, and users is critical to the success and longevity of any open source project.

But the wide-open nature of open source makes these working connections harder to establish, manage, and maintain. The people working on these projects do not know each other personally, and they are not physically in the same office. And somehow, they need to find a way to establish workflows together for the success of the project they are working on together.

So when we asked ourselves what might help these open-source relationships flourish, we realized that what we’re really asking is - how can we enable these stakeholders to collaborate in an async manner? What can we do to streamline their collaboration to make it fruitful for everyone involved?

###Livecycle Can Help
We believe that Livecycle is uniquely positioned to bring this value to the OSS workflow. And we’ve decided to test our hypothesis that our platform can be as useful to OSS teams as it has already proven to be for product-centric commercial teams.

How are we testing this theory? By enabling OSS support in Livecycle and offering it for free, forever to any public OSS project.

As a company, we are big believers in OSS. As individuals, we are maintainers, contributors, donors, and users ourselves. And so if our tool can help the OSS community, we are determined to make it happen.

###How Livecycle Brings Value to OSS
Here are some of the key ways that Livecycle can bring value to OSS projects by enabling collaboration:

- **One-click visibility:** By installing Livecycle on an open-source project, you gain the instant ability to experience any version of the project. Livecycle provides an ephemeral environment for every PR and commit. This means that anyone is just a single click away from experiencing the project or a specific feature, without the heavy lifting of project installation and configuration.

- **Easily reproduce reported issues:** Livecycle automatically generates a reproduction ENV for any issue reported. No more guesswork and lengthy dialogues to clarify steps of reproduction. Issues are understood easily, leading to faster debugging and resolution.

- **Provide higher-quality feedback:** With Livecycle, contributors enrich the issues they report with contextual information. Livecycle provides one-click feedback capabilities from within the ephemeral ENV including annotations, screenshots, videos, and HTML/CSS changes. And as an added bonus - we’ve made it so easy that you don’t even have to be technical to generate these issues. But rest assured other contributors will easily understand them and resolve them in a heartbeat.

- **KPIs:** And If you are a real KPI fan, you can summarize the potential value as follows:

   - Faster PR turnaround time (for issues and feature requests)

   - Shorter MTTR (mean time to resolve)

   - More contributors which means improved maintainability of the project by proxy

###What types of OSS projects are relevant for Livecycle?
Open source is all about transparency, so as we become workload agnostic it is important to mention our current limitations for the supported workloads and annotation tools we offer today.

- **Workload support:** Single container and Monorepo architecture is currently our relevant OSS projects candidates (for the sake of namedropping: Gatsby, Next, Nuxt, React, Node, Docker, Vue, Vite, Webpack, and similar frameworks)

- **Annotation tools:** The main tools we offer currently are frontend-based visual feedback and issue reporting tools

- **More is yet to come:** The next step for Livecycle is adding more tools and useful functionality. So here is your opportunity to try it out and share your honest feedback with us

###Who exactly can benefit from what we offer?
Let’s break it down in terms of who exactly will be a lot happier when Livecycle is installed on OSS:

- **Maintainers →** Improve the maintainability of the project, generate more traction, and 10x the amount of contributors

- **Contributors →** Becoming a contributor has never been simpler. You’re just a click away from giving your genius feedback. We know you always wanted to do it, so here’s your chance

- **Users →** You’ll get a better product - higher quality and increased velocity for adopting new feature requests coming from you
For us here at Livecycle, the bottom line is that we’re in the business of making developers happy. And what better place is there to help the community and make it happen than in the world of OSS?

So what are you waiting for? [Install Livecycle to your OSS project today](http://oss.livecycle.io/).

And if we can help with anything - please don’t hesitate to give us a shout.