It monitors many short-lived, task branches. Setting the branch status to resolved
triggers Trunkbot to poll issue trackers for permission to launch builds, run tests and CI.
It will then notify the success or failure of the merges and updates the appropriate status
in Slack, issue trackers... when completed. Let Trunkbot move your code from done to shipped
to production automatically!
In the eventuality that the Merge Machine in the Plastic SCM server is unable to merge branches, Conflictsbot will immediately notify the users. Conflictsbot tracks all branches in a repo: when conditions are met, it will run dry-merges of them with main. If it requires manual intervention it will notify and change the branch status for you. Otherwise it's queued to be merged and shipped with Trunkbot!
1 A developer has to work on task 1213 (taken from Jira, or any other issue tracker).
2 They create a branch for it and names it following a convention (Plastic does this automatically if an integration with the issue tracker exists).
3 They work on the branch making as many checkins as they need.
4 When they're done, they set an "status" attribute on the branch as "resolved".
The code review can be just a quick walkthrough using Plastic diff or an in-depth one. Plastic provides a built-in code review, but others like Crucible can be used too.
5 Another team member will review the changes in task1213 to make sure it is ok. If not, task will be reopened and the cycle will be restarted.
6Some teams will "validated" the task – other team member will do a short exploratory test to make sure the new feature or change makes sense. Status can be set to "validated" in the attribute.
7Your CI system, using the Plastic SCM plugin, monitors branches that have a given attribute set, and creates new plans accordingly. A branch will only be considered by the CI system when it reaches a given status. In this case status: validated.
8Your CI system will try to merge the Plastic branch.
If it fails, the process will be restarted and the developer will have to rebase from main to
solve any conflicts.
If the merge can be made automatically, the CI system will run the test suite.
9If tests pass, the merge is checked in and the branch is now ready to be delivered.
