In this document, I will explain the workflow to follow for doing work on the team project. The workflow mostly follows the popular GitHub Flow workflow. Here is a summary of the workflow:
✅ Create a Topic Branch for Your Task
✅ Push Work Done on Your Topic Branch to the GitHub Repo
✅ Merge Changes to the main Branch into Your Topic Branch
✅ Review and Merge the Pull Request, Possibly Making Corrections along the Way
Details about the various steps of the workflow follow.
It is assumed that you will have already completed your coding-task plans for the iteration as per the Task Planning Activity.
For each coding task you work on, you will perform your work in a topic branch.
From the main branch, you might use this command to create a my-topic-branch topic branch and to switch to that branch:
git switch -c my-topic-branch
This git switch -c command will create a topic branch in your local repository.
The branch should have an appropriate name signifying the functionality that will be added.
To set up a tracking branch in the GitHub repo that corresponds with this local branch, run this command:
git push -u origin my-topic-branch
After you run the above git push -u command once, you can begin working on your task, committing and pushing your work as you go.
While on the topic branch, make changes, commit them locally (i.e., using git add and git commit), and push them to GitHub. All changes made this way should be fully contained within the topic branch.
Because you set up tracking with the remote branch, you can use this shorter form of git push to push changes to the GitHub repo:
git push
main Branch into Your Topic BranchIf other teammates merge changes into the main branch while you are working on your topic branch, you will need merge those changes into your topic branch before you’re done. From your topic branch, you can use this command to merge the remote main branch into your topic branch (although you may need to manually resolve merge conflicts after the command):
git pull origin main
Once you complete a task, the next thing to do is merge your work into your team’s main branch. To do so, you must submit the work via a GitHub pull request. Then, one of your other team members must review the pull request. Once the other team member finds the pull request acceptable, they must accept the pull request and merge it into the main branch.
Create the pull request as follows:
All other pull request fields may be left blank.
It is the job of one of your other team members to review your pull request. They must test it to make sure that it works and confirm that it can be fast-forward merged with the main branch. They must post comments or change requests if they find issues. To test the code, they can pull the branch to their local repository and check it out using the following commands (assuming that the topic branch is named my-topic-branch).
First, they must download the latest state of the remote repo, like this:
git fetch
Then, they must switch to the my-topic-branch branch, like this:
git switch my-topic-branch
If changes are needed, the author of the topic branch must make them to their working copy and push them to GitHub (all still in that topic branch). The pull request will be automatically updated to reflect the changes. The author will probably also want to reply to the comment in the pull request, so the reviewer is notified of what’s happened.
Once the reviewer approves the change, they should also merge it into the main branch.
If other pull requests are merged into the main branch before yours is, you will need to merge those changes into your topic branch before your pull request can be merged (see the Merge Changes to the main Branch into Your Topic Branch section above).
Once you successfully merged a pull request, you must mark the scenario status as “complete” or “partially complete” in the backlog document. If you mark it as “partially complete”, you must also describe which parts are complete and which are not yet complete. In the backlog document, you should also add a link to the pull request that added the functionality.