Code for Baltimore projects should be built with the intention of deploying on Heroku or Netlify. For details on Heroku Best Practices see their developer documentation.
We are using Github Issues to track outstanding issues and work for projects.
Github Projects help organize our repositories by creating a Kanban board to track issues. These boards can be automatically generated by Github when creating the Project and should include a Todo, In Progress, Under Review, Reviewer Approved, and Done column. As issues are added to a Project they should be added to the board. A repo can have one or many Projects or boards at any given time.
When breaking down work it is important to add tasks to the Github project. For convenience various types of issues have templates built into this repo for easy issue entry. Before tasks are entered the project managers should agree on milestones based on the Project objectives. Issues should be tracked against Milestones so progress can be measured and planned for.
When entering issues tagging can be used to further organize work or make work more visible to team members.
Regardless of Language:
- Default to
lowerCamelCasenaming convention - Use static code analysis tools to improve code quality and consistency
- Code modifications within a repository should be performed on a branch, that will be merged to master via a pull request once approved.
- Provide meaningful code comments
- All commits must include a useful commit message
Consistent style guidelines for each language should be used. Where possible, openly published standards by authorities providing or using the language will be used.
Example: Google has openly published style guides for many languages in wide use on their open source projects, and these can be adopted for use in this project: Google Language Specific Styleguides
Static code analysis tools should be used when possible, to monitor and improve code quality. This may be integrated in the local development environment, automated repository commit checks, automated CI/CD pipelines, or other steps in the code development process.
All code work should be done in an isolated or feature branch off of the master branch. Before starting work on new code, developers should create their feature branch using a standard naming convention determined by the project.
Branch names should follow this patter: <your github username>/issue-<github issue number>. This will ensure there are no branch name conflicts, and anyone looking for your branch will know what it is called based on the issue addressed. For example if your username was letsGoOs, and you were working on issue 8, then your branch name would be letsGoOs/issue-8. If you wanted to make a new branch to continue your work on your issue then add a suffix with an incremented number. To continue the previous example if you wanted to make a second branch for your issue 8 work your second branch would be called letsGoOs/issue-8-2.
When work is complete, and after static code analysis has been performed, the developer should submit a pull request in Github. A pull request template has been provided, and developers should take care to fill out the form as completely as possible when submitting new pull requests omitting any sections that are deemed unnecessary for that particular submission. Pull requests should require at least 1 review from another verified team member before they are approved and merged into the master branch.
While not strictly required, it is recommended that pull requests are submitted early on in the development process with the intention of maintaining high visibility over the work while it is in progress.