Software development process must be traceable. How we start from the requirements and how it being converted into a ticket, then in a Pull Request with a set of commits. A set. Not one in the day evening. Why? This post answers.
The more reasonable commits you have, the more traceable git history the project will have. That’s obvious.
But why do ween such “traceable” history of changes? To trace results right in the middle. When we have just 1 commit after year/week/day/etc, we don’t have a full “trace” of developers’ thoughts. Just 0 and 1 state. We can’t get back and take a look at some unfinished code. We can’t check the reason why this code is being changed. It’s not being developed in just one take. But our history we will have only a squashed final one.
That’s why smart people invent VCS, including SVN (2000), Mercurial (2005) and Git (2005).
By committing every reasonable change, we are doing a good service for our project. We can trace every ticket, every requirement till commits we create.
Let’s take a look at l3r8yJ/oop-cop/pull/125. It’s a pull request we managed to merge just today. This one solves this l3r8yJ/oop-cop/issues/85.
How its being done:
- Project Manager (@zoeself) assigned me on the task
- I’ve created a dirty skeleton without unit tests
- Then added a few tests
- Even more tests
- Introduced a few puzzles, and this one gets resolved according PDD methodology
- Clean it up, so Qulice says
BUILD SUCCEEDED. - @l3r8yJ approved pull request and @rultor merged it into
masterbranch
This is a traceable development. Thanks to these Git commit messages, we can build a thought line. A reasoning. This is an incremental contribution.
The result is:
- Each person can take a look at how this ticket being resolved
- Puzzles being converted into new tickets
So, the more traceable your commits, the more maintainable and transparent is the project. Many incremental commits a day. That’s the way.
Check a few more examples: eo-cqrs/eo-kafka/pull/429:
- @l3r8yJ reported a bug
- @l3r8yJ created a few smart commits
- @h1alexbel (me) asks about tests
- @l3r8yJ introduced new puzzles, in order to cut corners
- @h1alexbel (me) checked again, make a comment
- @l3r8yJ responds me back, we merged
- I found an old issue
- Created a few commits including skeleton, adding/removing object from
Place.java - Reported a broken test with
@Disabled+ puzzle, as explained here - @maxonfjvipon asked me to resolve code duplication inside
Place.javathat task also mentioned - I fixed that, requested a re-review
- @maxonfjvipon approved
- @yegor256 (an Architect) approved too and @rultor merged