Code and Asset Branching Best Practices Session 315 Philip Wolfe, Lead Developer Farm Credit Services of America

Lightning Round Agenda Introduction to Source Asset Management Terms and Definitions Initial Source Control Setup Branching for Continuous Integration Branching for Team Development Branching to Support Release Activities Wrap-up

Introduction to Source Asset Management As you work on your product, there are different versions of the product in use – Designers have the latest version – Quality Assurance has a stable version – Delivered projects are the “old” version Source asset management outlines a way to keep the different versions organized

Terms and Definitions Branch (noun) – a copy of the assets – Development (Dev) Branch – A “Work in progress” version of the project – Main Branch – The most current, stable version of the project – Release Branch – A copy of the project that contains what was actually released Branch (verb) – to make a copy of a folder and the contents of that folder.

Terms and Definitions Merge (verb) – To overwrite the contents of a destination folder with the changes from the source folder – Merging from Dev to Main means to make Main look Dev – Features vary by Source Control software Forward Integrate (FI) – Merge from parent to child

Terms and Definitions Reverse Integrate (RI) – Merge from child to parent Release Vehicle – How you deliver your product to your customer – Release to Manufacturing (RTM) – A major release of your project – Service Pack – A release that all customers should apply – Hotfix – A release that fixes specific defects for customers affected by those defects (not everyone)

Initial Source Control Setup Project NameDEVELOPMENTMAINRELEASESource

Initial Source Control Setup MAIN DEVELOPMENT Merge RELEASE Merge

Branching for Continuous Integration Main Development Merge

Branching for Team Development Main Feature Team 2 Feature Team 1 Merge

Release 1 Branching to Support Release Activities Main RTM SP 1 RTM Merge Development Merge

Wrap-up Branching helps you have multiple running versions of the product at the same time Branching helps you support continuous integration Branching helps you manage releases