Thank you for contributing to Cromwell. The project is sponsored by Broad Institute and has participants all over the world, who have collectively added tremendous value over the years. This page describes how we handle external contributions to maximize the impact of your work and reduce delays in getting your PRs accepted.
If you're thinking of writing a non-trivial amount of code to solve a problem, we encourage you to reach out via an issue to get feedback. It is likely we will have suggestions about how to proceed. It's also possible, though hopefully rare, that there is a hidden impediment that would prevent your solution from working. If we spot it at the idea stage, we can give you feedback much earlier than if we have to reject your pull request!
The Cromwell team at Broad maintains and enhances the application to serve the needs of both Broad Institute and external users. Sometimes, we may identify a feature idea or pull request that works and is a good idea, but we may be unable to commit to maintaining it indefinitely. This may be because it does not align with the strategic direction of the project, or simply due to time constraints on the maintainers. Once again, it always helps to solicit early feedback.
Because pull requests require a substantial amount of time to review carefully, we prioritize and schedule them into our sprints alongside all of our other work. At present, the team operates on three-week sprints so if you happen to submit a PR early on in the sprint it may be a while before a team member has a chance to look at it. We realize this may be frustrating and strive to provide timely updates about PR status.