Workspace Best Practice Guidelines

It is recommended that you adhere to the following best practice guidelines when dealing with Workspaces:

1. Do not limit the development environment just to developers. Adopt an agile software development model where the QA team is part of the development team, and where:

   • The QA team pre-validates changes in the Developer Workspace. The delivery of a feature to its parent is only allowed after pre-validation.

   • The Product Manager validates features in the development environment.

   This allows for the early detection of defects, leads to better quality features, and leads to more stable downstream environments. The agile model allows any design gaps that are identified to be fixed straight away.

2. Set up and plan for the following downstream test environments: User Acceptance Testing, Integration Testing, and Pre-Production Testing.

   • Populate the various test environments with the Integration Branches in the Design Time Repository (DR).

   • Migrate the changes in a given Integration Workspace (IWS) to downstream Runtime Repository (RR) environments as follows:

     • Populate downstream Test environments with the Integration Branches for a particular release. Once the release is approved for Production deployment, deliver the Integration Branches to the root MAIN branch.

     • Always update Production environments from the MAIN branch.

   • The Test environment reflects the next release so populate it as soon as the previous release has shipped and populate it repeatedly as changes are delivered. You can have more than one test environment.

3. When ready, deliver the Release to MAIN.

4. Immediately migrate MAIN to Production.