The MeV teams welcomes contributions of bugfixes, UI enhancements and new modules to the MeV project. Contact the MeV team in the Developers forum if you are interested in being a part of the project.

All code contributed by an outside developer must be reviewed by the MeV team.  If MeV contains unit tests that test the modified code, all tests must pass before the new changes are accepted. After they are accepted, the MeV team will merge them into the source repository and they will be released with the next major MeV version. These releases are done twice per year, in November and May.

Specifications New code submitted to the MeV project should include, either within the code itself, or in a separate document, specifications describing what the new changes do or will do. This document can be submitted with code changes or ahead of time. If you want to ensure your contribution is accepted into the standard MeV distribution submitting this ahead of time is the best bet.

Developer documentation Code contributed to the project should include complete Javadoc-style code comments. Small changes that are not suitable for Javadoc should be briefly described with inline comments.

User Documentation New features or changes to existing features must to be documented in the MeV user manual. Complex new modules or systems can also be written up tutorial-style for inclusion in the tutorials section of the MeV website.

Code and UI conventions When loading data from flat files for use in MeV, the file chooser should be opened in MeV's default directory.

Getting the source code MeV source code can be checked out from the MeV subversion repository. We recommend that if you would like your contribution to be included in future releases you check out the trunk.

If you do not plan to contribute your changes to the MeV project, please keep in mind that you will not be able to distribute your work unless you also include complete source code, and you must abide by all terms of the Artistic License v2.0. That said, we recommend you choose the latest bugfix branch and make your changes there.