# Goals and objectives of the DITA Open Toolkit

The long term goal of the DITA Open Toolkit is to provide a high quality implementation for production level output of DITA XML content, built in a professionally-managed project environment by vetted contributors, and tested thoroughly for each release.

The DITA-OT may be used in a variety of ways:

- It may be integrated as one component in a larger end-to-end production pipeline. Either the minimal or standard package may be the most suitable for this use.
- It may be used on its own as a complete DITA production system. Users looking for this will most likely use the Full Easy Install package.
- It may be integrated into vendor tools such as editors or content management systems, to provide an easy DITA production system. The minimal package is designed for this type of use.

## Project objectives

The project will be managed similarly to any commercial software development project, with requirements gathering, plan validation with stakeholders, scheduled activities, tests, reviews, and builds, with an emphasis on quality.

The project will emplace a process for tracking all contributions. Any individual or any organization can contribute, but the spirit of the community is personal contribution. IBM as Committer is desirous that all major contributors get appropriate recognition in press releases, etc..

The DITA Open Toolkit project will track and fix bugs reported against its products, and issue patches based on urgency.

The DITA Open Toolkit project will track to major version updates of the DTDs/Schemas by the OASIS DITA TC.

The DITA Open Toolkit project will track to bug fixes of the DTDs/Schemas by the OASIS DITA TC as necessary (such fixes tend to have little impact to tools).

The project agrees with the Open Source motto of "Release early and often" to get wide consensus on issues. The project works with an Agile development process, releasing test builds approximately every three weeks, and encourages feedback on test builds while function is being development.