Codeline Conventions

Codeline conventions is a variant of the Codeline Policy pattern in which commonly used codeline policy features are captured in more general conventions.

For example, it is common to capture common usage policies in codeline naming conventions. The addition of a suffix indicating the codeline's purpose; 'int' for an integration codeline, 'dev' for development, 'tst' for test, and so forth. The precise details of such a naming convention will be derived from the needs or common usage within your organisation, some general guidance may be found on the Identity page.

You can also extract common policy statements into a common policy document. This makes sense when using the more dynamic branching patterns such as Branch per Task where it would be laborious for every branch to provide full codeline policy documentation. In these situations it makes more sense to create a project or organisation wide policy statement, possibly referenced through a naming convention. So, for example, any branch with a 'FIX' prefix uses the 'fix codeline policy'. This 'fix codline policy' states that; the codeline owner is the current assignee of the associated fix (as determined by the issue tracking tool); the codeline's lifecycle is concluded when the change is closed in the issue tracking tool; that the change will be integrated into a release specific staged integration branch (again, specified by the issue tracking tool) once the change reached 'ready for test'; and so on.