This document provides a starting point for anyone who wishes to contribute to the Power*Architect project, including non-developers.

The first thing we would recommend doing is to contact the Power*Architect team. You can email the developer's mailing list here, or put a post on the official Power*Architect forum here.

There are many ways that you could contribute to the Power*Architect project, including:

Contributing Code

If you would like to contribute to the source code, there is a Getting Started Wiki page that should explain everything you need available here

Bug Reports

If you think you've found a bug in the Power*Architect, we recommend that you first try to reproduce the bug in the latest nightly build. Nightly builds are available here and are labeled by the date they were created.

If you can successfully reproduce the bug in the latest nightly build, please check out our Bugzilla database available here, (register for an account if you haven't already) and see if you can find bug report that describes your bug. If you can, you can add a comment to the bug describing any additional information that is missing. You can also click on 'Vote for this bug' to indicate to the development team that you would like to see this bug fixed.

If no bug report exists, then you can contribute a bug report into our Bugzilla database, as well as notifying the development team through the Support Forum. We strongly recommend that you include in your report:

1. A step-by-step description of how to reproduce the bug.
2. What outcome you were expecting to see, especially for User Interface glitches.
3. The version of the Power*Architect that you were running.
4. The Operating System you were running the Power*Architect on.

User Documentation

If the Power*Architect User Guide is incorrect, out-of-date, or hard to understand, we welcome contributions for improving it! We make our User Guide DocBook XML source available as part of the project. You can view the GettingStarted Wiki page under the 'Get the Source Code' section to see how to get the project source. The user guide source should be available in the 'doc' directory as PowerArchitectUserGuide.xml. This file uses the Simplified DocBook format, which you can learn more about here.

Translation

We have started to notice interest in the Power*Architect from users in non-English speaking countries. We would welcome any volunteers interested in helping to properly translate the Power*Architect user interface and documentation to other languages.