feat: propose a protocol for loopback-next PR process

Author: raymondfeng

PR-PROCESS.md

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+# Pull request process
+
+The pull request (PR) process reflects the team culture on collaborating within
+the open source project. At LoopBack, we strive to foster a supportive,
+collaborative, and constructive environment for everybody to enjoy working
+together with the same passion to create great values for our community. Both
+community and code matter for us.
+
+Our maintainers are very distributed around the world with different time zones
+and work schedules. Some of us are paid full-time IBM employees while others are
+voluntary community contributors. Most of our changes are officially accepted
+into the code base via pull requests.
+
+To facilitate collaborations, this document establishes a protocol on reviewing,
+approving, and landing a pull request for [loopback-next](https://github.com/strongloop/loopback-next).
+It has the following objectives:
+
+1. Defines a process that PR author and reviewers can follow
+2. Set the expectations among our maintainers who are distributed
+3. Strike a good balance between the time we can land a PR and the quality of
+   the proposed change
+
+For general knowledge about github PR process, see:
+
+https://help.github.com/en/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests
+
+We also have a tutorial to cover how to submit a PR to `loopback-next`:
+
+https://loopback.io/doc/en/lb4/submitting_a_pr.html
+
+## The PR process
+
+### Submit a PR
+
+Provide some context
+
+- Pointing to an existing issue
+- Summarizing the problem/solution
+- Linking to document changes/diagrams
+
+Check the items from the PR template
+
+Set the right labels
+
+Consider to break complex PRs into a few smaller ones
+
+### Assign a primary owner and nominate additional reviewers
+
+When a PR is submitted, github automatically suggest some of reviewers based on
+(CODEOWNERS)[https://github.com/strongloop/loopback-next/blob/master/CODEOWNERS]
+and those who have worked on the code recently.
+
+### Review a PR
+
+The reviewers should make it explicit for different categories of feedbacks, such as:
+
+- Must have/fix (the author must address such comments)
+- Nice to have/fix (the author should try to address such comments but they don't
+  block the PR from being landed)
+- Nitpick (up to the author to decide)
+
+For `Must have/fix` Request changes
+
+Ping peers if the process is stalled.
+
+- https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/reviewer/
+- https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/good-code-reviews-better-code-reviews/
+- https://medium.com/palantir/code-review-best-practices-19e02780015f
+
+Iterative commits
+
+To address review comments, it's recommended to keep pushing new commits as the
+PR will automatically pick up new changes pushed to the same source branch.
+
+Such commits should be squashed and reorganized to maintain a clean history.
+
+### Approve a PR
+
+### Veto a PR
+
+### Land a PR
+
+Minimum requirements:
+
+- CI is green (with exceptions that the failure is caused by known issues)
+- Approved by the owner
+- Approved by mandatory reviewers
+
+If the author of a PR is a maintainer, he/she will be responsible for landing
+the PR upon approvals. Otherwise, the owner of the PR should land it on behalf
+of the community contributor.
+
+Other maintainers can land the PR for the author too to avoid further delays
+in case of preparing a release or fixing build breaks.
+
+Depending on the nature of a PR, we'll decide the minimum duration that we keep
+it open even if the minimum criteria have been met so that other maintainers will
+have a chance to review the changes.
+
+- Trivial changes, such as fixing typos, code formatting issues, eslint violations
+
+### Follow up a PR
+
+- Additional reviews/comments
+- Create follow-up stories
+- Submit follow-up PRs
+- Revert a PR