Setting up parallel releases

About this task

Sometimes companies develop parallel releases of an application concurrently. For example, one team might be working on new features for release toolkit/3.0 of the toolkit application while another team works on bug fixes for release toolkit/2.1.

Since you will need to build your application for more than one release, you will need to create a different project version for each developing release.

For example, your team is working on a new feature release called toolkit/3.0, and is concurrently working on a bug fix release called toolkit/2.1; you want the toolkit/3.0 release to include the bug fixes from release toolkit/2.1 but you do not want the toolkit/2.1 release to include the features from toolkit/3.0.

In this case, you would modify the process rule for release toolkit/3.0 by adding the All Completed Tasks for Release toolkit/2.1 folder (not the folder template) to the toolkit/3.0 integration testing process rule so that the toolkit/3.0 integration testing projects pick up tasks from both releases. You would need to make similar changes for the other process rules in the toolkit/3.0 release.

Note that this does not remove the need for developers to merge parallel changes. If Joe makes a change to a file in toolkit/3.0, then Mary makes a change to the same file for toolkit/2.1, those changes will be parallel. (Mary’s change will be chosen for toolkit/3.0 because it is newer.) The two versions must be merged into a new version for toolkit/3.0.


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