Market 7 Engineering Team comes up with branching strategy.
June 12th, 2008 by Curtis Schofield
I heard today, while trying to learn exactly what our very talented
and passionate team was talking about, that branches and tags are
identical, unless you are talking to engineers. You see, branches and
tags are not identical[1]. They have different names and different
conventions.
It is very important to know - if you are going to be an engineer
going to an engineering party - do not forget what the
difference is between a tag and a branch[1].
At Market7 a branch is what we do before QA[2]. Think of it as the
whole company going out on a limb - we are about to release our
software to our user base. Since we are a quality company that enjoys
transparency in it’s negligee[3], communication and visual design, we have to make
sure that we do not discard any of the hard work that we put into
fixing bugs or improving the system and that every little detail gets
wrapped up and pushed over to the new production server.
This sounds nice.
In practice, there are so many various details that need to get
handled on a daily basis and throughout our 2 week development cycle
that it is entirely impossible to remember them.
So how do we solve the issue that our transcoder[4] needs to stay in
sync with our app server[5] and any changes that we make during our
quality assurance process[6] ?
We[7] introduce the concept of branching and this is what it means to our team:
1) Create Branch “release” Before QA
2) Bug Fix on Branch “release”
3) Push Fix to HEAD[8]
4) CI [9] Machine creates Tag
5) Deploy CI-tag
Thank you [10]
— Authors notes.
1: [actually they are identical.]
2: [Starting now. ]
3: [ I'm speaking only for myself and the other guy that lives in my head ]
4: [ which is running in a cloud of virtualized computers connected
to the internet through magic fairy dust ]
5: [ another magic fairy cloud computer - this one requires blood
sacrifice to keep running. ]
6: [ shannon loosing sleep over the annotative player bugs ]
7: [ I wasn't traumatized by this discussion. ]
8: [ I know what your thinking - and it isn't because I'm a physicist. ]
9: [ Continuous Integration checks ever change we make against a huge
suite of tests and generally keeps us honest about how much we are
ninja-pirate-rockstar-hippies. ]
10:[ All this nonsense and turkey gizzard jargon is dedicated to small
animals everywhere, fighting to grow up in a rain forest that is being
eaten by yellow metal dragons.]
