Without the disciplined practice of version control, any team's agility is severely at risk - the ability to refactor freely, experiment safely or recover quickly from error is compromised without this safety net.Many Agile proponents see version control as a central practice - not just for Agility, but for professional software development in general. For new teams, or those without a consistent approach to version control, help is here. Henrik Kniberg's clear explanations are familiar to many from his popular InfoQ minibook, Scrum and XP from the Trenches. Now he has shared the details of the version control method used in that book, in his latest article Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams.
Henrik's method is described as a complete pattern, with all elements carefully described. An emphasis is placed on a clear understanding of what "done" means, and he proposes that this must include regression. The pattern includes
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The preceding diagram is an excerpt from the cheatsheet that accompanies the article. Graphics play an important part in explaining Henrik's approach so, in addition to the printable InfoQ version of the article, a separate printable .pdf is provided, as well as a one-page summary .pdf (cheatsheet) for developers to print and post as reminders at their work stations.
Henrik's method is described as a complete pattern, with all elements carefully described. An emphasis is placed on a clear understanding of what "done" means, and he proposes that this must include regression. The pattern includes
- Branch owner & policy
- The "done" concept
- The Done branch
- When do we create additional branches?
- Work branches
- Publishing from work to trunk
- What if our team implements multiple stories in parallell?
- Done includes regression testing!
- Diverging code (merging conflicts)
- Multiple teams - what if other teams are publishing to the trunk as well?
- Release branches
The preceding diagram is an excerpt from the cheatsheet that accompanies the article. Graphics play an important part in explaining Henrik's approach so, in addition to the printable InfoQ version of the article, a separate printable .pdf is provided, as well as a one-page summary .pdf (cheatsheet) for developers to print and post as reminders at their work stations.