Votazz Development Workflow

We have a backlog that is ordered in terms of our vision for the product coupled with key customer feature requests. Team members pull stories from the backlog as capacity allows. Typically their first step is to write tests to assert the behaviour we expect.

From there they will write code to make tests pass, and then refactor as needed.

When a team member is ready for code review they add two of their colleagues to a pull request. Their colleagues review the code for consistency, sanity, and against the acceptance criteria of the user story.

There are usually a few comments of things to consider, tidy up or change, and these are then incorporated.

During the code review we also begin user acceptance testing of the functionality in both Jira Data Centre and Server. At this point we're trying to ensure that what we deliver makes sense from a customers perspective. This often turns up UI/UX improvements for the story which are then subsequently included in the pull request.

Once the pull request has been approved the development branch is merged into our staging branch where we do final user acceptance testing before release. Once we are happy with the results we merge into the master branch which always represents what is in production.

For Jira Server & Data Centre we select a commit on master that contains the desired functionality, we than tag that with a version number and perform a manual release to Atlassian Marketplace.

On every commit to the development branch unit and functional tests are automatically run. Pre-commit hooks exist on the master branch which prevent a merge in the event a pull request has not been approved or tests are not passing.