Development:UsingJira

http://issues.jalview.org is the Jalview JIRA issue tracker, which is provided to us through a free license from [Atlassian].

Improvements to JIRA workflow

These are some notes on future JIRA configuration and how the Jalview development community should use JIRA.

1. Release targeting for patches. At any one time there are several releases in play:

   current stable

   The current branch available on the Jalview website.

   next-release

   The next release which is is in alpha/beta.

   future-release

   The development branch build.

2. New issues need to be assessed and targeted to a release before anyone should start coding.
   • Bugs and feature requests should be verified and prioritised as:

     hotfix

     These are critical patches and minor fixes that cause minimal disruption. They are worked on as branches from the current release that, if necessary, are merged onto other release branches as needed.

     nextrelease

     are more major patches and new features that change the users experience, and affect compatibility with previous releases in some way (ie require a change in semantic version number due to file format or API change). They are worked on as forks from the nextrelease branch and would normally be merged onto the development branch.

     futurerelease

     these are substantial work packages that involve concerted design and development effort, and introduce major changes to the system (ie creation of a new release series due to API and project/datamodel change).

     spike

     these are experimental/ad-hoc patches to experiment with new approaches/concepts. Any code produced may or may not end up in a future Jalview release, but creating them should inform the design and development of future Jalview releases.

3. Developers *MUST* assign a bug/issue to themselves before they start working on it.