CONTRIBUTING

OVVE Development Process

This process is based on GitFlow and GitHubFlow

https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/
https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Basic tenets:
- ‘master’ branch is always deployable.
- ‘develop’ branch is the shared branch used for work in progress.  
- Features are developed on branches from ‘develop’
- When a feature is completed, a developer creates a pull request to pull from the feature branch back to ‘develop’.
- Code is reviewed through the pull request.  Reviewers can pull the feature branch to test the code under review.  Comments can be entered in github.
- There could be further check-ins to the feature branch to resolve issues found during review.
- Once reviewers approve the review, the feature branch is merged to ‘develop’
- After merging to ‘develop’, the feature branch can be deleted
- When the team agrees that ‘develop’ is deployable, issue a pull request from ‘develop’ to ‘master’.   Review the changes and merge ‘develop’ to ‘master’.  Main releases will be tagged with the relevant version.


Merging and conflict
- Since there could be many features in flight at the same time, ‘develop’ can get updated after a feature branch is created.
- Developers should rebase their feature branch onto the ‘develop’ often to keep up with the current development stream.
- Developers must resolve conflicts in their branch before initiating a pull request to pull their feature branch back to ‘develop’.

Bug fixes
- Urgent bug fixes may be done from ‘master’ while development has continued on ‘develop’
- In this case, check out a bug fix branch from ‘master’
- Merge the fix back into ‘master’ AND ‘develop’