What are the best practices for integrating code changes into a shared repository?

- A clear branching strategy like GitFlow organizes feature development, while encouraging small, frequent commits maintains code manageability. - Pull requests serve as checkpoints for robust code reviews before merging, ensuring quality. - Automated testing via CI tools like Jenkins prevents regressions and upholds reliability. CI/CD pipelines automate build, test, and deployment processes, guaranteeing consistency. - Semantic versioning communicates change impact, and consistent documentation updates align information with the evolving codebase. - Branch protection rules enhance security, mandating standardized reviews.

One thing to consider when selecting a branching strategy is to not deviate from it. I've seen teams or rather individuals go off from their selected branching strategies and end up in a spaghetti branching strategy where dev is prod, prod is test and so forth. Additionally understanding the selected branching strategy. Often times, teams overlook the definition or use cases of these strategies and become inherently confused. Avoid it by studying the concepts and examples. Final note on this is to just go with what the industry standard is. No need to re-invent the wheel, just go with the Git Flow!

When designing your branching strategy, establishing a clear and consistent naming convention is paramount. It ensures that team members easily understand and adhere to the defined strategies. Here are examples of naming conventions: Feature Branches: Prefix with feature/ to denote branches focused on developing new features or functionalities. Ex: feature/user-authentication Release Branches: Prefixed with release/, these branches prepare code for deployment into production. Ex: release/v1.0.0 Hotfix Branches: Use hotfix/ to quickly address critical issues in the production codebase. Ex: hotfix/bug-fix-auth Support Branches: Prefixed with support/, these branches may cater to long-term support or maintenance activities. Ex: support/v1.0

Feature flags keeps your changes hidden to achieve trunk-based development while keeping your production code in a deployable state. You can make your features visible in specific environments or users.

Another point to consider is the product release strategy, Using the right strategy which aligns with your release strategy can make things smoother for developers and OPs.

Definitely branch correctly and ensure to have it peer reviewed plus accommodate for lead review for final merge which ensures if unit, performance and functional tests have been performed along with access to those results. This ensures consistency and rigor to quality

The aim should be to automate as much as possible. Using tools like static analysis and linters can help. Quality gates based on those tools’ results can control if the code changes have met the right level of quality. A team should also have a good agreement of what they want to achieve from a code review. It much be a learning and improvement experience than a blaming or pointing fingers. Adhering to industry coding standards could help to avoid discussions around different personal preferences of naming conventions or coding styles.

Automated tests plays are crucial to keep your code in a deployable state while keeping your features stable and also met other cross-functional expectations like performance and security. Keeping your feedback loops closer to the developers will increase the confidence to release software frequently. Also, bring some metrics like Lead time, Deploy frequency, Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) and Change fail percentage to assess the current state of your process.

To achieve the full benefits of CI, you should aim for automated tests which go beyond service boundaries, the purpose of integration is to find issues related incompatibilities of new changes compared to what was expected. Using e2e tests and contract tests can help to discover these issues quickly after integration or even before integration at merge request level.

Continuous integration tools like jenkins , GitHub Actions etc along is very important where in there are frequent commits and multiple team members are working on that branch. CI can automate the build and testing process as soon as the commit is made and can help to detect the issues at early stages and avoid rework. As part of the CI we can have unit testing, code quality tools like Sonarqube and ESlint integrated. In addition to this functional automation testing can also be part of CI. This will help to fix the issues immd and also improve the code quality and also productivity. Fastlane can also be considered along with CI it can complement and improve the pipeline by automating various tasks.

Architects must be aware of various styles and trade offs encapsulated within each design to make effective decisions. When choosing an architectural style, one must consider all architectural characteristics such as : 1. Operational characteristics: Availability, Continuity, Performance, etc. They heavily overlap with operations and DevOps concerns. 2. Structural Characteristics: Configurability, Extensibility, Portability, Localization, etc. Code structure should be one of the top concerns in mind with good modularity, controlled coupling between components, readable/reusable code, etc.

The leader needs to clearly define who is responsible for updating the caller code in case of a breaking change in an internal shared repository of an organization: The answer can be the team who maintains the caller code, or the one who maintains the shared repository. In my teams, I make it crystal-clear that a person making a breaking change in a shared repository should either fix the caller code, or follow-up with the owner of the caller code to ensure it gets fixed. In both cases, the breaking change and the updated caller code must be committed together. This strategy allows all teams (other than the teams in a code freeze) to use the latest versions of shared repositories at all times.