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+## What
+
+Guidelines for CI/CD automation templates to be shipped by the package-maintenance team.
+
+> **Note:** This set of guidelines _is not_ about telling projects what they can and cannot do. Instead, it's a framework for those who are interested in building out bare-minium CI/CD templates for projects in the JavaScript ecosystem to use.
+
+## Why
+
+Provide a baseline, common set of CI/CD infrastructure that can be relied upon regardless of what CI/CD providers are used by a project.
+
+## How
+
+These guidelines are intended to be just that – guidelines. We will also include templates for common CI/CD providers and accept contributions of templates that implement these guidelines from the community.
+
+It's worth noting that projects **do not** need to use one of the provided templates, but **do** need to ensure that their CI/CD setup enables them to follow the required guidelines at the very minimum. Projects are by no means restricted to the required guidelines – more complex and dynamic configurations are more than welcome.
+
+## Definitions
+
+Definitions for the various terms used in the guidelines:
+
+### Required
+
+To say a CI/CD template follows the "tests" guidelines documented here, it would need to meet all of the **required** marks. The same approach applies to for all other guidelines.
+
+### Optional
+
+**Optional** guidelines are, as the name indicates, optional for templates to include. They're _nice to have_ but by no means required.
+
+## CI/CD Guidelines
+
+- Tests
+  - **Required**:
+    - `npm test`
+      - This can be any testing framework exposed via `npm test`.
+      - Many CI/CD systems run this implicitly for JavaScript projects. You do not need to explicitly define `npm test` in these cases.
+    - `npm ls`
+      - If `npm ls` exits with a `0` exit code, your build should pass
+      - If `npm ls` exits with a non-`0` exit code, your dependency graph is invalid and should fail the run
+  - **Optional**:
+    - code coverage
+      - failure if code coverage is below a well-documented threshold
+- Operating System Versions
+  - **Required**:
+    - Windows
+    - macOS
+    - Linux
+      - All active LTS releases of Ubuntu or your CI provider's default Linux OS
+- Node.js Versions
+  - **Required**:
+    - nodejs@current
+    - nodejs@lts
+      - This includes all active and maintenance versions
+  - **Optional**:
+    - nodejs@nightly