Forking workflow

tjarvis November 29, 2016

So we have a team of about 10-12 developers and we are wanting to move to a Fork / Pull request style workflow, primarily so that there is a code review process before code is committed to the upstream (build / ci) repository, but also so that we can keep the upstream repo lean and clean and have private collaborations etc.

The code reviews are peer reviews, and with such a small team we would prefer not to have just 1 or 2 "gatekeepers" with write access to the upstream repo, we'd prefer all devs to be able to respond to a pull request do the review and merge into upstream.

Some issues / questions on this

1./ How to we ensure that devs don't bypass the process and simply push directly to upstream, is there an ability to only provide read access except when responding to a pull request ? Or is this purely a discipline thing. (IMO if it can be done, at some point it will be done)

2./ We mostly have our Bitbucket accounts attached to our private email accounts with team access to the company repository, is it possible to have notifications of pull requests / merge failures to go to the company email address instead of (or as well as) the private email address?

3./ Is there any other notification mechanism available? (slack or sms or something else) or is email the only one?

4./ Given what we are hoping to achieve, is this the right approach, or should we stay on a central repo type model and protect build branches from unreviewed code some other way?

 

 

1 answer

1 vote
Jonathan Craig November 30, 2016

We use PR Harmony addon (free) to improve control over PRs.  It allows a list of suggested reviewers and required reviewers and a minimum number of reviewers.  In our case we set min to 1 as you can't approve your own request.  Then we block pushes so all updates come through PRs.

We also use YACC (yet another commit checker) to require valid JIRA tickets and commit messages for better traceability.

As for additional notification channels, I believe HipChat is the easiest to integrate.  We do not use HipChat so I can't comment much beyond its existence.

 

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