Re: Advice on process for web development

2010-10-29 Thread Les Mikesell 

On 10/29/2010 9:04 AM, Giulio Troccoli wrote:



Sometimes your baseline will evolve. Maybe because your QA
team approved some new features for production, maybe because
you made urgent corrections.
If it's approved for production it will be your new baseline.
All branches from this baseline will need to be "rebased"
before releasing, they need to incorporate any production changes.


So, basically, I need to merge changes in trunk from the previous "production" revision 
to the current "production" revision (which may not be HEAD at all) to the branches.


Or just make different 'cuts' from the trunk to new QA branches, which, 
if everything works can be copied unchanged to production tags.  If you 
have to make changes in QA, you have to make an additional decision as 
to whether the fix needed there also applies to the ongoing trunk, and 
if so, merge it - or maybe it has already been done on the trunk.



Why your QA team have a branch??? They won't ever make
changes, so all they need is a tag. I mean, in SVN it's the
samething, but in the concept it's a lot different.


If things never change between the cut from trunk and the production 
release, what's the point of the QA step?  It is possible, in fact 
likely, that you'll need changes for a release after the trunk has moved 
on to include things you don't want in this release.



The QA team does not have a branch. I realised I said "create a QA branch as a copy of 
trunk" but then in the command I did create the "branch" in tags. Which doesn't mean 
that they cannot change it, but it will be prevented and, as you said, conceptually is different.


If you made a tag for QA you can always copy it out to a branch after 
discovering it needs changes.



Thanks for your input, however, you haven't touched on the main issues I have, 
which is about the case of an urgent fix.


If you had a QA branch corresponding to each release, you'd have an 
obvious place to make maintenance fixes specific to that release.  But 
that doesn't solve your problem of making sure the fix also is done in 
the trunk - unless you do the work on the trunk and merge to the branch 
to add the fix.  How you do that needs to be a human decision, not 
driven by the process.  If the process could solve all your problems you 
wouldn't need this urgent fix in the first place, you'd have caught it 
in QA.  Since it is something unexpected, you need to understand it and 
figure out separately how it relates to the now-different trunk.


--
   Les Mikesell
 lesmikes...@gmail.com


--
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikes...@gmail.com

RE: Advice on process for web development

2010-10-29 Thread Giulio Troccoli 
CC-ing the list 

> -Original Message-
> From: Luiz Guilherme Kimel [mailto:lki...@dba.com.br] 
> Sent: 29 October 2010 15:44
> To: Giulio Troccoli
> Subject: RES: Advice on process for web development
> 
> Giulio,
> 
> I would recommend you a reference book for SCM patterns. Try 
> ADDISON WESLEY Software Configuration Management Patterns. It 
> has solutions
> 
> Answering your questions, you need to stablish baselines for 
> your software.
> Branches will have one baseline as their common start point, 
> as their "base". This base will usually be a stable version 
> of your software. Let's say your baseline is exactly your 
> current production release.

What you're saying is that the branches should be created as copies of trunk at 
a specific revision, i.e. the production one. Have I understood correctly?

> Sometimes your baseline will evolve. Maybe because your QA 
> team approved some new features for production, maybe because 
> you made urgent corrections.
> If it's approved for production it will be your new baseline. 
> All branches from this baseline will need to be "rebased" 
> before releasing, they need to incorporate any production changes.

So, basically, I need to merge changes in trunk from the previous "production" 
revision to the current "production" revision (which may not be HEAD at all) to 
the branches.

> Your correction will be tested isolated, approved and merged 
> to your trunk for tagging and release. If your development 
> branches are based on the trunk, then you will need to merge 
> trunk changes to each development branch to rebase them. Use 
> the development branch for integration so that the next 
> approved branch will always merge to the trunk with no 
> possibility of conflict. After rebasing, apply new QA tests.

I'm not sure I understand you here.

After the development in a branch has been completed, the branch is tested and 
if approved merged back into the trunk. Surely though I need to test trunk as 
well. I didn't say, but yes when a branch is reintegrated into the trunk, the 
other branches should merge from trunk to get those changes.

> Why your QA team have a branch??? They won't ever make 
> changes, so all they need is a tag. I mean, in SVN it's the 
> samething, but in the concept it's a lot different.

The QA team does not have a branch. I realised I said "create a QA branch as a 
copy of trunk" but then in the command I did create the "branch" in tags. Which 
doesn't mean that they cannot change it, but it will be prevented and, as you 
said, conceptually is different.

> Do you already use any project management and bug tracking 
> tool? If not, I would recommend MantisBT.

We do. It's actually part of what the Web Team does.

Thanks for your input, however, you haven't touched on the main issues I have, 
which is about the case of an urgent fix.

Giulio

> Best Regards,
> Luiz Guilherme M. Kimel
> 
> 
> -Mensagem original-
> De: Giulio Troccoli [mailto:giulio.trocc...@uk.linedata.com]
> Enviada em: sexta-feira, 29 de outubro de 2010 09:20
> Para: users@subversion.apache.org
> Assunto: Advice on process for web development
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm working with our Web Team to re-engineer their 
> development process. All the code is already under 
> Subversion, but everything is in one big directory. They're 
> not using any branch or tags for that matter. And of course, 
> testing is not as rigorous and controlled as it should be. 
> Anyway, I have suggested the usual trunk/branches/tags layout.
> 
> Developers will normally work on branches, but can 
> occasionally work directly on trunk for easy and quick fixes. 
> The tester will create a QA branch as a copy of trunk at a 
> specific revision. When they are happy that a QA is ready for 
> releasing, a tag is created from the QA (or maybe from trunk 
> again at the same revision).
> 
> I think they will go for such a solution, even though it 
> means that they cannot pick-and-choose what to test. If they 
> want to test a bug fixed in revision 1000, they will also 
> test all bugs fixed in previous revision.
> 
> The problem is that they may want to fast track an urgent bug 
> fix. It shouldn't happen often, but it may happen so I need 
> to come up with a solution for that case too.
> 
> What I'm thinking is something like the following. Let's 
> supposed that 1.1 is the latest release, i.e. it's what's in 
> production.
> i) the developer creates a branch off the tag
> svn cp http:///tags/1.1 http:// REPO>/branches/1.1_urgent_fix -m"Creating branch fro urgent 
> bug 123456"
> ii) the developer makes all the necesary, coding and testing
> iii) the fix is merged back to trunk
> cd trunk
> svn merge ^/branches/1.1_urgent_fix .
> svn ci -m"Fixing urgent bug 123456"
> iv) the branch goes live
> svn cp http:///branches/1.1_urgent_fix 
> http:// REPO>/tags/1.2 -m"Fixed bug 123456"
> switch the production site to point to ^/tags/1.2
> v) at th