KOSD, or Kopi-O Siew Dai, is a type of Singapore coffee that I enjoy. It is basically a cup of coffee with a little bit of sugar. This series is meant to blog about technical knowledge that I gained while having a small cup of Kopi-O Siew Dai.
Code reviews are a best practice for software development projects but it’s normally ignored in startups and SMEs because
- the top management doesn’t understand the value of doing so;
- the developers have no time to do code reviews and even unit testing.
So, in order to improve our code quality and management standards, we decided to introduce the idea of code reviewing by enforcing pull requests creating in our deployment procedure, even though our team is very small and we are working in a startup environment.
Firstly, we set up two websites on Azure App Service, one for UAT and another for the Production. We enabled Continuous Deployment feature for two of them by configuring Azure App Service integration with our Git repository on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).
Secondly, we have two branches in the Git repository of the project, i.e. master and development-deployment. Changes pushed to the branches will automatically be deployed to the Production and the UAT websites, respectively.
In order to prevent that our codes are being deployed to even the UAT site without code reviews, we created a new branch known as the development branch. The development branch allows all the relevant developers (in the example below, we call them Alvin and Bryan) to pull/push their local changes freely from/to it.
Once any of the developers is confident with his/her changes, he/she can create a new pull request on VSTS.
We then proceed to make use of the new capability on VSTS, which is to set policies for the branches. In the policy setting, we checked the option “Require a minimum number of reviewers” to prevent direct pushes to both master and development-deployment branches.
So for every deployment to our UAT and Production websites, the checking step is in place to make sure that the deployments are all properly reviewed and approved. This is not just to protect the system but also to protect the developers by having a standardized quality checking across the development team.
This is the end of this episode of KOSD series. If you have any comment or suggestion about this article, please shout out. Hope you enjoy this cup of electronic Kopi-O Siew Dai. =)
cuteprogramming 