The Subversion Mistake

At my workplace, when I first got here, we were doing the waterfall method of development. We would do 3 months worth of hard work, with thousands of commits and tons of features. Then we would hand things off to QA to test. Spend a few more weeks bug fixing. Then when things were 'certified' by QA, we would spend a whole weekend (and the next week) doing the release and bug fixing in production. Then the cycle would repeat again. Ugly.

Now, based on feedback I gave, we use an iterative approach to development. It is extremely flexible and has allowed us to increase the rate of releases to our customers as well as the stability of our production environment. We did about 9 iteration releases in 3 months, our customers got features more quickly and we have fewer mid-week critical bug fixing patches. Everyone from the developers all the way up to the marketing department loves that we have become more agile as a company.

In order to support this model of development, we had to change the way we use subversion. Before, we would have a branch for the version in production and do all of our main work on trunk. We would then copy any bug fixes to that branch and do a release from there. I reversed and expanded that model.

• Trunk is now what is in production.
• Main development and bug fixes happen on numbered iteration branches (iteration-001, iteration-002, etc.)
• Features happen on branches named after the feature. (foobranch, barbranch, etc)
• Each iteration branch is based off of the previous iteration. If a checkin happens in iteration-001, it is merged into iteration-002. (ex: cd iteration-002; svn merge ^/branches/iteration-001 .)
• No commits happen directly to trunk, only merges. For midweek releases, we cherry pick individual commits from an iteration branch to trunk. (ex: cd trunk; svn merge -c23423 ^/branches/iteration-001 .)
• Feature branches are based off of an iteration.

Unfortunately, we are quickly learning that subversion does not support this model of development at all and I've had to become a subversion merge expert.

Read more: Kick me in the nuts

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