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All ACME developers should be familiar with the basics of development with git including cloning the ACME repo, making a branch, committing changes, and submitting a Pull Request on Github. For more info see, the Git Tutorial and the Development Quick Guide.
Group Leads and Task leads coordinate and schedule development relevant to their group. They should have developers assigned to work on features in the order necessary to meet ACME's deliverables. Group leads should make sure developers are finishing their work and getting it merged to the ACME "master" branch.
Integrators: every group has 2 or 3 Integrators who take completed feature branches and, if they meet the requirements, merge them to master. See Integrator Guide for more info.
The Coupled Model Group established the timeline for major new features (especially from two or more groups) that are needed for the model, relevant testing criteria, and when the master should be tagged (using the Branch, Tag, and Version name conventions) all timed to meet ACME deliverables. Integrators should be aware of the overall schedule for their component.
A branch for every feature: Group and task leads and developers should define units of code development that are big enough to be relevant to others, but simple enough that it can be called one feature (or perhaps a couple of highly-interdependent features) and make a branch for each unit of work. These branches are called "feature branches" in our documentation. The developer should make commits that are minimal atomic units of work to complete the feature that the branch seeks to implement. This separation makes it easier to review and debug later. New development should always start as branch from "master". Avoid creating "large" branches that contain many features and touch dozens of files. If a large branch is needed for some major development, the SE hub should be involved in planning."master" is always stable: Our code development workflow ensure that master is always stable and can be used to start new development
Bug fix branches: When a bug is found on master, the branch for developing a fix should start from the commit that introduced the bug. This is so that any feature branch which also contains the bug can easily merge in the bug fix without having to merge in many other changes on that may have occurred while the feature branch was being developed.
Focus on your branch: While working on their branch, developers should focus on the work necessary to complete the branch and not worry about what else is going on. In particular, there is almost never a need in git to "merge from master" or "stay current" with development going on in master or other branches to make the eventual merge easier. If a developer thinks a merge from master or another branch is necessary to complete their work, they should check with an Integrator first.
"master" is always stable: Our code development workflow ensure that master is always stable and can be used to start new development.
Testing and Merging: When the feature branch is done, the developer makes sure the acme_developer test suite passes (or the failures are expected). When the test results are in order, the developer issues a "pull request (PR)", and designates an Integrator. The Integrator conducts the code review, merges the feature branch into the "next" integration branch and tests the feature within the latest version of ACME using the acme_integration suite. The integrator and developer may need to work together to resolve any issues that arise from the code review or testing in the "next" branch. The integrator will then merge the branch into master. Once merged to master, the branch is complete and the developer can move on to other topics. See the Development Reference for more information. In summary:
- One feature per git branch (ideally)
- One pull request (PR) per branch (absolutely)
- Nothing gets added to "next" or "master" except by merging a branch through a PR (absolutely).
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