Revision as of 09:34, 18 October 2013

Release Cycles

Each release cycle should follow this pattern:

1. Development (2 - 4 Weeks): During this phase, new functionalities are developed.
2. Testing and bug fixing (1 - 2 Weeks): This gives time for the users to test and the time bug fixing and a quick retest.

Versioning

Semantic Versioning: Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

• MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
• MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
• PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

• Scheme: major.minor.patch, example: 1.2.3.
• Odd minor version numbers denote development/unstable branches. For example, stoney cloud 0.8.x is considered stable, while stoney cloud 0.9.x is considered development/unstable.
• New features are added to unstable/development versions only.
• We have separate version numbers for the separate components (installer, online-backup, ldap-schemas, ...).

We start with 0.1.0 for development and 0.2.0 for first stable release.

Development Procedure

We have a minimum of two branches:

1. Trunk (development): Master branch, normally without name tags, for testing reasons we set tags: v0.5.0_pre1
2. Branch 1 to N (stable branch(es) for bug fixing): v0.2, the tag for a release would be: v0.2.1 to v0.2.N
3. Branch 2 (second stable branch for bug fixing): v0.4, the tag for a release would be: v0.4.1 to v0.4.N

This results in the following development procedure:

• Features are scheduled on the individual module roadmap pages for implementation in specific future stable versions and are implemented (and tested) in development versions.
• A new major version will be released, when all features and goals specified for this version are implemented and tested.

TBD: Describe stable and unstable in more detail

Development

Source Code Organization

We have the stoney cloud related repositories like installer, node-integration, ... These we keep as is (for the moment).

The web interface consists a bunch of modules. Each module has a separate GitHub git repository containing the following sub-structure:

GitHub:

• Form follows function: we choose the functionality name (so we are backwards compatible)
• Modules are collected in one repository (create a skeleton module as an example):
  • Data (LDAP)
  • API (PHP)
  • Web Interface (PHP, uses API)
  • Provisioning (Perl, ...)
  • Tests (GUI, Unit-Tests, ...)

See the Modularisation page for details.

Committing

Each change-set in the git repository (and thus each commit) ideally contains only one concise and consistent change. The commit-message precisely describes the change. If the change is in respond to a bug-report or feature-request, the number of the bug-report or feature-request is included.

Testing

Testing is done in a clean test environment and not in a developer environment. This means: all changes have to be committed to the git repository first and checked out from there in the test environment for proper testing.

Bug-Reporting/-Workflow

Bugs are to be reported on the modules issue tracker on GitHub.

Ideally we have someone who acts as the Bug-Wrangler. His tasks are:

• go over unassigned bugs and properly assign them (since we can't expect users to properly assign bugs)
• discover and close duplicated, invalid or otherwise inappropriate bugs (so the Bug-Wrangler must have search-fu)
• request more information from the user if necessary (like the version of involved components, canned responses can be used/saved in the GitHub issue tracker for that purpose)
• request time estimates from developers
• kick developers and testers and make sure the issue-list stays short (therefore it would make sense if it's someone from stepping stone GmbH)
• manage the priority of bugs if necessary