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# Hypothesis development

Hypothesis development is managed by David R. MacIver and Zac Hatfield-Dodds, respectively the first author and lead maintainer.

However, these roles don’t include unpaid feature development on Hypothesis. Our roles as leaders of the project are:

1. Helping other people do feature development on Hypothesis

2. Fixing bugs and other code health issues

3. Improving documentation

4. General release management work

5. Planning the general roadmap of the project

6. Doing sponsored development on tasks that are too large or in depth for other people to take on

So all new features must either be sponsored or implemented by someone else. That being said, the maintenance team takes an active role in shepherding pull requests and helping people write a new feature (see CONTRIBUTING.rst for details and these examples of how the process goes). This isn’t “patches welcome”, it’s “we will help you write a patch”.

## Release policy

Hypothesis releases follow semantic versioning.

We maintain backwards-compatibility wherever possible, and use deprecation warnings to mark features that have been superseded by a newer alternative. If you want to detect this, you can `upgrade warnings to errors in the usual ways`.

We use continuous deployment to ensure that you can always use our newest and shiniest features - every change to the source tree is automatically built and published on PyPI as soon as it’s merged onto master, after code review and passing our extensive test suite.

## Project roadmap

Hypothesis does not have a long-term release plan. We respond to bug reports as they are made; new features are released as and when someone volunteers to write and maintain them.