Difference between revisions of "DevelopmentStagingProcess"

OurWork

What (summary)

Come up with the ability to be able to stage branches for testing purposes.

• Immediate action when necessary
• A platform to incrementally release and user test things before they go live

Why this is important

• This will enable us to more fully test large changes (external access to developer branches)
• Not surprising users in "a bad way"
• Rarely make "mistakes"
• Getting better at communicating with our users so they know when things are about to be installed

DoneDone

• Branches can be staged, both on till and local developer machines
• Methodology is clearly defined for how things enter the staging process
• we start staging our larger changes, to smooth out our impact on the live tree

Steps to get to DoneDone

1. Install PHP from source and document it on InstallingAboutUsOnLinux/InstallPhp
2. We should toss up a solution that makes sense to us ... DevTools
   
3. Then convene a meeting of all stakeholders to discuss our prototype staging process and whether there are tweaks we should introduce

Stuff

• easy script to create a branch
  • make sure it doesn't conflict with an existing branch name
  • branch aboutus and compost
• easy script to make a branch active on your (the developers) box
• branch serving on till
  • port allocation for compost mongrels
  • apache config
• easy revert for when things get hosed (tags?)
• Ability to see what has been running on the live site (date based tags would be fine, possibly a log of hashes or whatever)
• easy script to merge + close branches