Skills Acceptance Process
The Skills Acceptance Process outlines how Skills are tested, reviewed, deployed and promoted through the Mycroft Marketplace.
It is vital that Mycroft Skills exhibit high quality, and are well tested to encourage adoption, and ongoing development of the platform. This process contributes to that goal by providing a structured framework to follow to ensure repeatable outcomes.
The process consists of 6 stages:
- 3.
- Code Review
- Information Review
- Functional Review
- 5.
- 6.
Before submitting your Skill we assume you have:
- Create your README.md using the Skill Meta Editor. We also have some additional tips for a great README.
- Personally tested your Skills functionality to ensure it is working as expected. For a detailed testing overview, see stage three below.
- It is also a great idea to post a link to you Skill in the Skill Feedback category of the Forums to let others test your Skill on different platforms. This is encouraged but not required to submit your Skill to the Marketplace.
- Ensure any Python or other packages required to run your Skill are included in your requirements.txt or equivalent.
mycroft-skill-testrunner /opt/mycroft/skills/your-skill-directory
When you are satisfied your Skill is ready, submit it for formal review by running:
mycroft-msk submit /opt/mycroft/skills/your-skill-directory
If you don't have the mycroft-msk command available, you can manually activate the Mycroft virtual environment and run
msksource ~/mycroft-core/.venv/bin/activate
msk submit /opt/mycroft/skills/your-skill-directory
This will upload the Skill to Github if it isn’t already, and generate a pull request to add your Skill as a Git submodule to the Mycroft Skills Repo.
We have developed an Integration Test Runner that assists you in writing tests that can be executed at both an Intent and a Skill level. Learn more about Automatic Testing of your Mycroft Skill.
This automated testing is run as soon as you submit your Skill to the Mycroft-Skills repo, and with each major release of Mycroft-core.
The Skill Testing Team is made up of experienced Mycroft Community Members and Mycroft AI Staff. One of the team’s responsibilities is to ensure Skills meet minimum quality, technical and functional standards to maintain the user experience with every Skill in the Marketplace. When a Skill Author submits a Skill to the Mycroft Skills Repo, the Skill Testing Team conducts three reviews.
a. Code Review - ensuring the code is stable and secure
b. Information Review - ensuring all info is accurate and understandable
c. Functional Review - ensuring the experience of using the Skill is intuitive
The Skill Author will receive feedback and may need to solve issues identified in these reviews before it will be approved.
The purpose of this step is for a Mycroft AI staff member to do a final check of a Skill. The staff member will be looking for:
- Profanity – does the Skill contain profanity?
- Sexually explicit material – does the Skill contain sexually explicit references or language?
- Offensive or pejorative language – does the Skill contain offensive references or language, for example language that is homo-, trans-, or bi-phobic, racist, religiously intolerant etc.
- Other content that has the ability to damage the reputation of the Mycroft platform.
If any such content is found, the PR for the Skill to be added to the Mycroft Skills Repo will be tagged as flagged and escalated for review by Mycroft AI senior management, who will then make a determination on whether the Skill will be pulled into the Mycroft repo.
If the Skill passes all reviews, it will then be merged into the Mycroft Skills Repo. Once it is merged, the Skill becomes available for any Mycroft Device to install using voice commands.
Once a Skill is deployed, the following measures may be taken by Mycroft Staff promote the Skill to the Mycroft Community. The Skill Author is of course welcome to do additional promotion of their own.
- Shoutout in Mycroft Newsletter
- Notification through Mycroft social media
We also encourage the Skill Author to make a short video of the Skill in action to aid in promotion.
While a Skill is undergoing review, there are several labels used on the PR to help indicate status.
- approved - This Skill is ready to be merged to the current branch, ie 18.02
- needs validation This Skill needs validating by a Community Member and cannot be validated by Skills Team
- new This is a new Skill (rather than an update to an existing Skill)
- override autotester The Skills Team has determined that acceptance of this PR should override the AutoTester
- under review This Skill is being reviewed by the Skills Team
- update This Skill is an update to an existing Skill
- waiting This PR or Issue is waiting on the Skill Author to respond
Mycroft Skills Repo labels
Often, Skills will have niche requirements. For example, they may be dependent on third party APIs or the installation of entire software stacks. In this case, it is impractical for the Skill Management Team to test the Skill.
Instead, the Skill Management Team will seek assistance from the Community, and will invite the Community member who volunteers to add comments to the Pull Request. Then, the Skills Management Team will review the comments and merge or decline the PR.
Head to our contribute page to submit an application and see the many other ways you can be involved.
Our Skills Testing Team are a fantastic group of community members who ensure that all Skills are secure, stable, accurate, and intuitive. The team has members with a range of skills and communicate through a private channel on chat.mycroft.ai.
Last modified 2yr ago