Align workflows

[defagos]

As a developer integrating Pillarbox I would like to have a regular stream of updates. As a Pillarbox developer I need to be able to reliably and efficiently deliver increments in a way that is similar between platforms.

Acceptance criteria

• A workflow alignment proposal has been discussed and documented.
• Where testing occurs in this workflow has been discussed.
• The workflow does not introduce unnecessary friction.

Hint

As discussed within the team one approach could be to have closed issues or PR set the status to Testing instead of Done, but this might not be easily feasible for the web.

Tasks

• [x] Discuss current workflows.
• [x] Document decisions.

[defagos]

@amtins investigated workflow possibilities in a dedicated issue. We can on all platforms:

• Integrate changes as early as possible in main.
• Create releases from main depending on the output of additional manual tests.

This workflow likely requires the issue DoD and increment DoD to be adjusted so that manual testing is part of the increment DoD, whereas the issue DoD focuses on automated testing, code review, developer documentation, etc.

Questions remain about changes delivered early on main if an emergency release must be delivered e.g. If several PRs have been merged for a feature still in development and an emergency fix is needed, we can deliver from main directly (instead of creating a hotfix branch). In this case:

• Features without APIs could be hidden behind feature flags (e.g. a UI button).
• API changes could be marked as pre-release but this might be annoying. Maybe they should be published as well, or maybe in such tricky cases we could fall back onto hotfix branches opened from the last stable tag.

We should likely address these questions if they are raised in the future, it is likely premature to take decisions at the moment.