Project Management Plugin

Project lifecycle management — onboarding, documentation quality, handoff readiness, and community health for research software projects in any language.

Purpose

This plugin handles the human and organizational concerns of running an open-source research software project. It answers: "Is this project well-documented? Can a new contributor get started? Is it ready for handoff? Does it have the right community files?"

It does NOT handle GitHub platform mechanics (CI/CD, Actions, releases, org management) or containerization — those are separate plugins.

Prerequisites

• Git: For repository operations
• GitHub CLI (gh) (optional): Enhanced handoff assessment with CI/CD status and issue/PR checks

Agents

Agent	Description
Project Onboarding Specialist	Expert in project initialization, contributor onboarding, and knowledge transfer for research software
Documentation Validator	Expert in documentation quality assurance, setup instruction validation, and completeness checking

Skills

Skill	Description
community-health-files	Templates and guidance for README, CONTRIBUTING, LICENSE, CODE_OF_CONDUCT, SECURITY, CITATION.cff, and issue/PR templates
documentation-validation	Validation tools (Vale, markdownlint, HTMLProofer) and documentation quality metrics

Commands

Command	Description
/setup-project	Scaffold a new project with community health files and standard structure
/project-handoff	Assess project readiness for handoff to new maintainers
/validate-project-handoff	Test that setup instructions and documentation actually work

When to Use

• Starting a new research software project and need standard community health files
• Onboarding new contributors and need to verify documentation quality
• Preparing a project for handoff to new maintainers
• Validating that setup instructions actually work
• Auditing documentation completeness

Related Plugins

This plugin focuses on project lifecycle. For other concerns, use:

Need	Plugin
GitHub Actions CI/CD, releases, org audit, issue triage	GitHub plugin
Docker, Singularity, Podman, container registries	Containerization plugin
Python-specific development practices	Scientific Python Development

Integration with Other Plugins

• GitHub Plugin — After scaffolding with /setup-project, use /ci-setup to add CI/CD workflows
• Containerization Plugin — Use to add Dockerfiles after project setup
• AI Research Workflows — Use /research and /plan for complex project management tasks

Migration from Previous Version

This plugin was previously a monolithic plugin covering GitHub platform mechanics, containerization/DevOps, and project lifecycle. It has been refocused to handle only project lifecycle concerns. If you previously used capabilities that are no longer in this plugin:

Previous Capability	New Location
/ci-setup, /triage, /release-plan, /audit-github-org	GitHub plugin
GitHub Actions workflows, pre-commit hooks, issue triage	GitHub plugin
Docker, Singularity, Apptainer containers	Containerization plugin