- Break your work into small, single-purpose patches if possible. It's much harder to merge in a large change with a lot of disjoint features.
- Submit the patch as a GitHub pull request. For a tutorial, see the GitHub guides on [forking a repo](https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo) and [sending a pull request](https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests).
- Follow the style of the existing codebase. Specifically, we use [standard Scala style guide](http://docs.scala-lang.org/style/), but with the following changes:
- Make sure that your code passes the unit tests. You can run the tests with `sbt/sbt test` in the root directory of Spark.
But first, make sure that you have [configured a spark-env.sh]({{HOME_PATH}}configuration.html) with at least
`SCALA_HOME`, as some of the tests try to spawn subprocesses using this.
- Add new unit tests for your code. We use [ScalaTest](http://www.scalatest.org/) for testing. Just add a new Suite in `core/src/test`, or methods to an existing Suite.
- If you'd like to report a bug but don't have time to fix it, you can still post it to our [issues page](https://github.com/mesos/spark/issues), or email the [mailing list](http://www.spark-project.org/mailing-lists.html).
