So you have seen an interesting new feature mentioned on IRC and you want to try it out? Perhaps you want to see how exactly a particular change was implemented or comment on the way it was designed. Or perhaps you would like to produce a patch that depends on some changes being made in the development version. A lot of Zabbix development happens out in the open; here are the main phases you could be interested in:

• A specification being created
• A development starting in a separate feature branch
• A feature being merged into the main branches

Providing feedback early is likely to be helpful and has a higher chance of impacting the design. If you are interested in a specific feature, you could previously have followed the specification on http://zabbix.org/wiki/Main_Page, but that phase is closed now. Zabbix uses SVN for code versioning. The feature branches in SVN provide very early access to the code, and that is a great time to try out and test the features.

We talked about testing things out; let's find out how to get code that has not been released as a version yet.