Project Management¶
An Overview¶
For software development purposes, we utilize git
and GitHub extensively
for version control and project management. This is crucial since we must
keep track of hundreds of bugs, improvements, and changes for several
repositories.
We use GitHub tools to track and implement changes to the software. First, we
use GitHub issues to identify and track bugs/issues/features, and
GitHub pull requests or “PR” so that a developer can suggest a set of
changes to be merged into the master
/main
branch. Within these
issue and PR tracking, we use labels to indicate what these changes/problems
pertain to. Each repository has a set of labels. Labels are helpful to
understand scope and impact and aids in GitHub search engine optimization.
To understand the scope of any work, we use GitHub milestone tracking.
Finally, we use GitHub project boards to illustrate and manage issues and
PRs. Each repository has its own project board. These are kanban style boards
with several columns/lists.
DevOps workflow¶
The general workflow are as follow when starting any improvement:
Create a new GitHub issue if one does not exist. Begin tracking it in the project board
Create a new branch locally
Commit changes to branch and push them to the new branch on the remote repository (i.e. GitHub)
Create a PR within the repository to merge the new branch into the
master
/main
branchA team member reviews the PR (if enough developers are on staff). Self-review are OK if staff is limited.
The changes are merged into the
master
/main
branch and any associated tags are pushed to the remote repositoryThe software is manually deployed
Branching¶
It is strongly recommended to use git
branches for software development.
This is because, at any point, multiple features/bugs are being addressed,
and changes pushed directly to the main branch could break the software if
it is untested or has not been reviewed. Branching is a common Developer
+ Operations (“DevOps”) best practice. To create a new git
branch, use
the following git
commands:
$ git pull master
$ git checkout -b <name_of_branch>
To checkout an existing branch:
$ git branch # To see existing branches
$ git checkout <name_of_branch>
In terms of branch names, it is strongly recommended to name branches so it is clear and concise. We strongly recommend including:
The GitHub issue number
Whether it is a feature/enhancement or a bug fix
A short description
The above ensures an easier understanding to the software development team. Examples include:
feature/235_preserve_prep
for LD-Cool-P#235hotfix/229_400_error
for LD-Cool-P#229
Note: Our branching model initially followed a git-flow
workflow with
features, hotfixes, and releases; however, we later moved away from that
model and now use a GitHub flow workflow where all changes are merged into
the master
/main
branch after review and testing.
Versioning and tagging¶
In all of our software, we conduct version tagging. Here, each new version refers to a change to the codebase that is to be deployed. We loosely follow Semantic versioning (SemVer), which denotes changes as MAJOR, MINOR, and PATCH. There are two differences with our method of versioning against SemVer:
We use the patch denotation for both hotfixes and small enhancements to software.
We use MINOR denotation for large/larger enhancements (e.g. a completely new feature rather than an improvement to an existing feature).
MAJOR remains the same, for incompatible API changes. We try to avoid the latter as much as possible.
While some open-source software teams may not use version tagging, there are
many advantages. First, this step ensures that we have continuous delivery
of our software. Second, for some of our software, we automatically deploy
them on PyPI, a python
package manager that allows for easy
installation of the software. Finally, our logging tools records version
information for each software, so this allows the team to trace an issue
back to a specific PR. To tag a specific commit:
$ git tag vX.Y.Z -m
A vim
prompt will appear so you can provide a message for the tag. Often
a short message referring to the GitHub issue number will suffice.
You will then push the tag via:
$ git push --tags
Merging code¶
TBD on using git
over GitHub merge tool.
Milestone tracking¶
More details needed here.