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CONTRIBUTING.md

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+# How to contribute
+
+We'd love to accept your patches and contributions to this project. We do have
+some guidelines to follow, covered in this document, but don't worry about (or
+expect to) get everything right the first time! Create a pull request and we'll
+nudge you in the right direction. Please also note that we have a [code of
+conduct](CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) to make OpenFermion an open and welcoming
+environment.
+
+## Before you begin
+
+### Sign our Contributor License Agreement
+
+Contributions to this project must be accompanied by a [Contributor License
+Agreement](https://cla.developers.google.com/about) (CLA). You (or your
+employer) retain the copyright to your contribution; the CLA simply gives us
+permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of this project.
+
+If you or your current employer have already signed the Google CLA (even if it
+was for a different project), you probably don't need to do it again.
+
+Visit <https://cla.developers.google.com/> to see your current agreements or to
+sign a new one.
+
+### Review our community guidelines
+
+This project follows [Google's Open Source Community
+Guidelines](https://opensource.google/conduct/).
+
+## Contribution process
+
+### Code reviews
+
+All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We
+use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult [GitHub
+Help](https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-requests/) for more
+information on using pull requests.
+
+The preferred approach for submitting pull requests is for developers to fork
+the OpenFermion [GitHub repository](https://github.com/quantumlib/OpenFermion)
+and then use a [git
+branch](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Branches-in-a-Nutshell)
+from the fork to create a pull request to the main OpenFermion repo.
+
+### Development environment setup
+
+Please refer to the section _Developer install_ of the [installation
+instructions](docs/install.md) for information about how to set up a local copy
+of the software for development.
+
+### Tests and test coverage
+
+Existing tests must continue to pass (or be updated) when changes are
+introduced, and code should be covered by tests. We use
+[pytest](https://docs.pytest.org) to run our tests and
+[pytest-cov](https://pytest-cov.readthedocs.io) to compute coverage. We use the
+scripts [`./check/pytest`](./check/pytest) and
+[`./check/pytest-and-incremental-coverage`](./check/pytest-and-incremental-coverage)
+to run these programs with custom configurations for this project.
+
+We don't require 100% coverage, but any uncovered code must be annotated with
+`# pragma: no cover`. To ignore coverage of a single line, place `# pragma: no
+cover` at the end of the line. To ignore coverage for an entire block, start
+the block with a `# pragma: no cover` comment on its own line.
+
+### Lint
+
+Code should meet common style standards for Python and be free of error-prone
+constructs. We use [Pylint](https://www.pylint.org/) to check for code lint,
+and the script [`./check/pylint`](./check/pylint) to run it. When Pylint
+produces a false positive, it can be silenced with annotations. For example,
+the annotation `# pylint: disable=unused-import` would silence a warning about
+an unused import.
+
+
+### Types
+
+Code should have [type annotations](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/).
+We use [mypy](http://mypy-lang.org/) to check that type annotations are
+correct, and the script [`./check/mypy`](./check/mypy) to run it. When type
+checking produces a false positive, it can be silenced with annotations such as
+`# type: ignore`.