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Version: 0.15.50

Levels of Maturity

Features and code within Great Expectations are separated into three levels of maturity: Experimental, Beta, and Production.

  •   Experimental: Try, but do not rely
  •   Beta: Ready for early adopters
  •   Production: Ready for general use

Being explicit about these levels allows us to enable experimentation, without creating unnecessary thrash when features and APIs evolve. It also helps streamline development, by giving contributors a clear, incremental path to create and improve the Great Expectations code base.

For users of Great Expectations, our goal is to enable informed decisions about when to adopt which features.

For contributors to Great Expectations, our goal is to channel creativity by always making the next step as clear as possible.

This grid provides guidelines for how the maintainers of Great Expectations evaluate levels of maturity. Maintainers will always exercise some discretion in determining when any given feature is ready to graduate to the next level. If you have ideas or suggestions for leveling up a specific feature, please raise them in Github issues, and we’ll work with you to get there.

Criteria Experimental
Try, but do not rely
Beta
Ready for early adopters
Production
Ready for general use
API stabilityUnstable*Mostly StableStable
Implementation completenessMinimalPartialComplete
Unit test coverageMinimalPartialComplete
Integration/Infrastructure test coverageMinimalPartialComplete
Documentation completenessMinimalPartialComplete
Bug riskHighModerateLow
note

Experimental classes log warning-level messages when initialized:

Warning: great_expectations.some_module.SomeClass is experimental. Methods, APIs, and core behavior may change in the future.

Contributing Expectations

The workflow detailed in our initial guides on Creating Custom Expectations will leave you with an Expectation ready for contribution at an Experimental level. The checklist generated by the print_diagnostic_checklist() method will help you walk through the requirements for Beta & Production levels of contribution; the first five checks are required for Experimental acceptance, the following three are additionally required for Beta acceptance, and the final two (a full checklist!) are required for Production acceptance. Supplemental guides are available to help you satisfy each of these requirements.

Criteria Experimental
Try, but do not rely
Beta
Ready for early adopters
Production
Ready for general use
Has a valid library_metadata object
Has a docstring, including a one-line short description
Has at least one positive and negative example case, and all test cases pass
Has core logic and passes tests on at least one Execution Engine
Passes all linting checks
Has basic input validation and type checking
Has both Statement Renderers: prescriptive and diagnostic
Has core logic that passes tests for all applicable Execution Engines and SQL dialects
Has a robust suite of tests, as determined by a code owner
Has passed a manual review by a code owner for code standards and style guides