Bounty Program

Bounty issues are one of the mechanisms through which work can be outsourced. They can be used for completing work on both the business and technology sides of the company. Inca also often uses bounty issues as introductory projects to vet potential employees or interns. These projects give interested individuals a chance to prove themselves, learn a bit about our company & products, and produce a useful result in the process. These projects are extremely independent and will require you to manage your own time and work process.

Bounty Projects

Bounty projects are posted within the Incaoutsourcing/bounty folder. They are posted as open issues here. Please see the Bounty Program Wiki for information about how work is submitted and payment is secured.

Bounty issues are going to be with people who have not been vetted by Inca as competent, creative, reliable, trustworthy, or interested. For this reason the issues should accomplish the following points:

• They produce useful results for us, and reduce our workload in some capacity
• They do not take much of any time from our team (to be accomplished, or to vet/use the finished results)
• They must not have any internal understanding of Inca/NTerminal and do not require much access/permissions to complete
• They can be achieved by driven people in a way that demonstrates their ability, creativity, and work mentality (in the case that we decide to integrate them more fully, this is crucial)
• They should be explicit and clear tasks with defined metrics of successful completion (but with the ability to go above and beyond if possible)

Issues Structure and Requirements

Each issue requires the following issue-specific feilds:

• Description - explains what the task is and how it might be used/integrated.
• Requirements/Functionality - details the specifications of the task, how results should be formatted/represented, which aspects to prioritize, qualitative or quantitative definifions of completion.
• Specific Nessesary Resources - tools, libraries, or files that will be needed to complete the issue.

Each issue also requires the following issue-agnostic fields:

• General rules
• Background - explaination of Inca and the Bounty Program
• Resources - general information (see https://gitlab.com/IncaOutsourcing/bounty/wikis/home)

Initiating a Bounty Project

The nature of outsourcing work requires bounty issues to have clear specifications and structure (as detailed above). It also requires that the task does not require much of any internal resources to be completed. Because these cannot always easily be identified and agreed upon by members on the tech team or business team, new employees should not directly create such projects. Instead, work can be requested or suggested to be outsourced using the bounty program. This is done by marking internal issues as potentially bounty-able. In these internal, bounty-marked, issues, the need or vailidity of outsourcing the task, requirements, and structure can be discussed and debated before the actual bounty issue is created.

To request or suggest work to be outsourced using the bounty program, please follow these steps:

1. Label or create an issue with the outsourced tag.
2. Assign the issue to the outsourcing manager (currently @diana.yerdaulet) or your project manager.
3. Detail the goal and description of the task.
4. Discuss requirements, nessesary resources, and issue format
5. Indicate an estimate of how much time/skills might be required for the task (this will help with determining whether it should actually be outsourced, and how much the pay-out should be)
6. Address questions/comments from outsourcing manager, project manager, or other teammates.
7. Await approval for outsourcing

After your issue is approved, the outsourcing manager will create the bounty issue within the Bounty Program Project Folder, or ask you to create the issue yourself.