Last week we talked about Versioning. But one other thing that came up when having discussions with customers and prospects was how to handle parallel development.
They wanted to work on multiple releases in parallel and asked how to handle this. First task of course is to have a common understanding on what you understand by parallel development and what does means in an ODI context.
Wikipedia defines parallel development (branching!) as follows:
Branching (version control)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Branching, in revision control and software configuration management, is the duplication of an object under revision control (such as a source code file or a directory tree) so that modifications can happen in parallel along both branches.”
But the second paragraph that talks about merging is as important and this especially in the context of ODI: “Branching also generally implies the ability to later merge or integrate changes back onto the parent branch. Often the changes are merged back to the trunk, even if this is not the parent branch. “
The key questions are:
- How to setup your ODI repository structure in order to handle parallel development?
- How to organize your Version Control Repository to support parallel development?
- How to merge?
- How often do you merge?
- Who is responsible for the merging?
- Who is King: your ODI Repository or your VCR?
- How do you keep your ODI Repositories in sync?
The coming weeks we will share how we and our customers think about parallel development in a sustainable way. And of course we would like to hear your opinion or hints and tips on this topic! Just add a comment and we'll address any questions you might have
About the author
Hello, my name is René De Vleeschauwer.
Throughout my career I've been responsible for the development of enterprise software. Since 12 years I've been leading the development of IKAN ALM, an open DevOps framework.
Do you have any questions about this post? Just ask me!