Question

We are geographically diverse team of software developers working on an ERP system.
We are using SVN as a version control system.
We have 4 environments before the code moves to production system.

I want to know what are the best practice, regarding BRANCHING, MERGING when using SVN in such situation.

Currently we face a problem that one file has 4 changes. The customer wants only 2 changes to be in X (yearly 4 main releases and 4 minor releases) release.

The problem we face are:
Too many Branches.
complicated Manual merge.
losing track or changes
overwriting someone else s code .

Can anyone answere how can one solve this issues by using SVN as a better tool, which it is.

Thanks and Regards, Kedar Hukeri.

Answer 1

Maybe a process how to get code to main branch would help more than different tool (other than source control system with good diff/merge).

It depends on your process but generally:

• good practice for bigger teams is to
  have a separate branch per new
  feature/fix
• developer before releasing code to
  main line would pull the latest from
  main to his branch and run all the
  tests to make sure it all works
• if the team is big you may have to
  consider a release manager – a person
  to manage the releases and simply
  freezing the main branch and managing
  the order in which the features go in
• even better, have release branches
  and a person that is allowed to merge
  new features into it, developers
  submit note that new feature is ready
  and one person merges the changes
  into main branch
• freeze release branch before release and run
  tests to iron bugs, don’t allow new
  features in only bug fixes when you
  are near release date
• depends on number of commits but you
  can create smaller releases which are
  more tested to establish milestones
  and functionality to be know to work
  in each point release

In the end, no matter what the exact process is the main point is that the developers understand the procedures and someone enforces it.