bcquality/docs/contributing.md

Contributing to BCQuality

Documentation | Knowledge by domain | Authoring reference

Partners are welcome to contribute shared knowledge, examples, skills, and documentation. To report an incorrect finding without preparing a change, use the support guide.

Your first contribution

You can propose shared guidance without write access to the upstream repository. Use this path for a correction or a new article:

1. Search the existing knowledge and open issues. Correct or extend an existing article when it already owns the concern; add a new article only for a distinct concern that meets the admission test below.
2. Fork BCQuality into your GitHub account or organization, clone your fork, and create a working branch from the current upstream main. Make edits in that branch, not the plugin cache.
3. Choose the owning layer and domain, then edit the article or use the shared-article starter. A contribution intended for everyone does not belong in custom/.
4. Add supporting sources and relevant good/bad samples. For a false positive, explain the valid pattern and the mistaken finding the rule should prevent.
5. Run the documented checks, then commit and push your branch to your fork.
6. On GitHub, open a pull request with base repository microsoft/BCQuality, base branch main, and your fork's working branch as the head. Explain why the change is needed and respond to review by pushing further commits to the same branch.

Merged content is not automatically loaded into an existing agent session. Consumers must pick up the updated content through their installation or checkout; see updates and versions.

What belongs here

BCQuality is a remedial knowledge base. A knowledge file exists because a capable LLM would get something wrong, or miss something, without it, not simply because the topic is important. Apply this admission test:

If this file did not exist, would a modern LLM reviewing or generating BC code make a mistake this file would have prevented?

Good candidates encode a BC-specific mechanic that models get wrong, a version-dependent behavior, or a misleading interpretation of an analyzer rule. For example:

• SetLoadFields and filters can be called in either order: their relative order does not change the projection. This prevents an incorrect performance finding.
• Boolean page record triggers default to true: omitting an explicit exit(true) is not itself a defect.
• Page fields can inherit captions: an omitted page-level property is not sufficient evidence that a caption is missing.

Generic advice such as "use HTTPS," "do not hardcode secrets," or "keep transactions short" does not earn a separate knowledge file merely by being sound advice. Negative clarifications that prevent false positives are as valuable as rules that catch defects.

Skills hold discovery and execution mechanics; knowledge files hold BC facts. Correct or extend a knowledge article when a BC fact is missing or wrong. Do not hide that fact in a skill's instructions. A genuine routing, input, or output-contract problem belongs in the skill instead.

Choose the right destination

Change	Destination
Knowledge in a Microsoft-owned review domain	microsoft/knowledge/<domain>/
Knowledge accompanying a Community-owned skill	community/knowledge/<domain>/
Company-specific policy or an override	custom/ in your own fork; never an upstream contribution
Partner instructions or how-to guidance	docs/, linked from the documentation index

Layer ownership follows the skill and domain, not your employer. For example, a partner's performance clarification belongs beside the Microsoft performance skill's corpus. Do not use Community as a staging area for an already Microsoft-owned domain. A split may exist briefly during promotion, but the skill and its canonical corpus should move together.

Upstream automatically closes PRs adding custom content. Follow Customizing BCQuality for organization-only rules. Do not introduce a new shared domain without the action skill that consumes it and the matching evaluation samples.

Author a knowledge article

Read READ for the schema and WRITE for the authoring rules. Use an existing article in the same domain as a starting point, then remove unrelated guidance.

Every article has six required frontmatter fields: bc-version, domain, keywords, technologies, countries, and application-area. domain must match its containing directory. Keep one concern per file, ideally under 50 lines and no more than 100.

Description is required. Put recommendations in Best Practice and mistakes to catch in Anti Pattern; those are the normative sections. Explain legitimate exceptions so a reviewer does not turn a useful rule into a false positive. Code fences are not allowed in knowledge articles.

Shared-article starter

Use caption-required-on-page-fields.md as a complete shared-knowledge example. It demonstrates all six metadata fields, a clear concern, normative guidance and exceptions, linked good/bad samples, and authoritative sources.

For a new concern, follow that structure but choose your own descriptive filename, domain, applicability, keywords, and guidance. Replace its sources and sample links with ones supporting your concern; do not duplicate the caption rule. If you are correcting caption guidance itself, edit the existing article instead. Use a company-only rule only in your fork's Custom layer, following the separate customization example.

Sources and examples

When adding or changing a platform claim, link the authoritative source that supports it, preferably the specific Microsoft Learn API/property page or a public source definition. State version constraints when they matter. Avoid "upstream guidance says" without a link. If the source is unavailable or the guidance is organization policy or empirical observation, say so explicitly rather than presenting it as an official platform guarantee.

Place source links in a short References section or beside the relevant claim. References do not replace the rule: keep all load-bearing guidance in the normative sections. This adds traceability without adding frontmatter fields or changing the schema.

Put demonstration code in sibling files:

<slug>.md
<slug>.good.al
<slug>.bad.al

Reference each sample with a clickable link whose label retains the filename, for example [`<slug>.good.al`](<slug>.good.al) with your actual slug. One or both samples are optional for an individual article; every review domain must have at least one complete good/bad pair for evaluation. Samples are self-contained demonstrations, not copied Base Application source and not a deployable or compiled application.

Before opening a PR

From your BCQuality checkout, use the existing validators. The Python validator needs Python and PyYAML; the fixture harness needs PowerShell 7. If PyYAML is not installed in your development environment, install it with python -m pip install pyyaml.

python .github\scripts\validate_frontmatter.py --root .
pwsh .\tools\Test-ReviewFixtures.ps1 -Root .

The first command checks schema, sections, naming, sample references, and skill registration. The second checks that every review leaf has a valid positive/clean sample pair. Neither proves a model will find every defect. See evaluation for optional model-based scoring.

In the PR description, explain the mistake being prevented, supporting evidence, applicable BC versions, and why the chosen domain owns it. For a false positive, include the valid pattern and the incorrect finding being prevented. Check that links and samples open from the rendered article.

Schema and stable protocol changes require approval from both maintainers. Avoid repeating schema or contract definitions in new guides: link the canonical READ, DO, WRITE, or Entry section instead.

Content releases

Maintainers cut content releases on demand, roughly monthly, using the Release version workflow on main. It tags the selected commit as v{major}.{minor}; it does not update the plugin manifest.

Use a minor bump for normal content updates and a major bump for breaking changes. The minor is a monotonic counter: it increments across releases and does not reset on a major bump. See updates and versions for the separate plugin, content, and skill version identifiers.