Agile

Code Quality

One of Metal Toad’s continuing goals for developers centers around mastery.


One of Metal Toad’s continuing goals for developers centers around mastery. There are some high-level ideas and objectives around this, but part of reaching mastery has to do with enhancing and maintaining the code quality of our projects. We’ve put some workflows in place for our projects, including changing the way we deploy and QA. Teams at Metal Toad function fairly autonomously, with the ability to create the tools and processes that work best for them; so I’ll be speaking for my team, as the QA Engineer for Team Mutant Ninja Toaders (TMNT).

Jira workflow

First up in our conversation - let’s talk Jira! Who else hates that damn Issue Detail View?

Issue Detail View aside, our team has established a pretty solid workflow for our sprints in Jira. From the screenshot below, you can see the columns we use to categorize our board. It looks like there’s a lot is going on, but the separation of columns helps us keep track of ticket responsibility, and ensures two passes of quality assurance before a ticket is considered ‘Done’.

Screenshot of TMNT's sprint board
TMNT's Jira Sprint Board

 

QA Column

When a developer is ready for their work to be reviewed, they transition the ticket from 'In Progress' to 'QA' and make a Pull Request (PR) in GitHub. As the QA Engineer, my lofty goal is to QA tickets within 24 hours. As a less experienced developer, I take a look at the code but concentrate on functionality, which is called grey-box testing. If everything is functioning as intended, I add a comment to the ticket that it’s ready for a code review, and one of our more experienced developers will do a more thorough code review. At that point, it either passes QA and transitions forward to 'Ready for Acceptance'; or it’s determined that QA has not been met, and the ticket transitions back to the 'To Do' column. If the ticket moves forward to 'Ready for Acceptance', the Pull Request is merged, and the work is merged from the feature branch to the dev branch.

Ready for Acceptance

‘Ready for Acceptance’ is a relatively new addition to our workflow. Whereas the QA column is my domain, the 'Ready for Acceptance' column belongs to our Project Managers and Product Owners - the Toads in charge of verifying that the finished item meets the clients’ desires and needs. If we all laid our groundwork correctly, the acceptance criteria was detailed in the ticket and used by the developer while working, so it’s rare for work to stumble at this step in the workflow. Once the Project Manager or Product Owner gives their final :thumbsup:, the ticket can be moved to the 'Done' column.

Github

In the previous section of this article, I briefly mentioned Pull Requests (PR). As of this writing, all projects at Metal Toad follow a version control workflow that includes PRs as a stage gate to changing a project’s codebase. The ability to approve and merge a PR is limited to Senior Developers and above; this follows the standards of our Career Matrix, which states that Senior Developers: lead code reviews and communicate best practices, and enforce review coverage as stories are closed. Through Pull Requests, everyone can easily see what code was added or modified by the work, which has several benefits:

  • Learning experience: allows developers to see how someone else solved a problem

  • Peer support: allows developers to coach and give feedback to their peers

  • Quality review: puts another pair of eyes on the work, which helps ensure code quality standards

Using PRs also means we can clearly see when a merge conflict is imminent. We’ve also recently added a PR template for our Github repos, which makes my QA Engineer heart flutter. Specifically, there’s a section with ‘Instructions to QA’, where the developer who did the work includes the necessary steps for QAing the ticket. This small but important detail means I can easily QA the work, and ensure I’m covering all of the bits and pieces of the site that may be affected by that ticket.

Pull Request template in GitHub for TMNT projects
Pull Request template

Continuous Integration

A few months ago, we started using Bamboo, which is Atlassian’s product for Continuous Integration (CI). Once a Senior Developer or Architect has approved the PR and merged the feature branch work into our dev branch, Bamboo creates a build and deploys to the dev environment. If something happens and the build is unsuccessful, the build logs an error and stops, preventing the deploy from taking place. Eventually, Metal Toad’s goal is to have a suite of tests for each project, ranging from unit to functional to visual regression testing, but currently only a handful of projects include tests. Bamboo’s Continuous Integration setup allows for deploys to also be dependent on passing tests, which is something I’ll dive into further on a future blog post about our CI setup.

Bamboo is not always intuitive to set up; but it can be a powerful and informative tool once you have a defined workflow in place. The automatic builds that come from merging PRs show the code commits that related to that build, including the commit message. The build logs also include the linked Jira issues and the ticket’s status.

Development pane for Jira ticket
Development pane for Jira ticket

Final Thoughts

It seems like there’s a lot happening here, right? Jira, Github, Bamboo; developers, QA engineers, Product Owners. There’s been some iteration to our process as we ditched things that didn’t work, and refined what did. Ultimately, we want the benefits of this workflow to outweigh the overhead of a cumbersome process. It’s been a work-in-progress to figure out what information is useful to share across systems, and what just creates noise and confusion.

We’ll continue to refine our process, but we have a really solid start to ensuring TMNT’s code quality. Each ticket has multiple points of oversight - my work as a QA engineer, a code review by another developer, and an acceptance review from a product owner. Our workflow also means that development is a team effort - something that Metal Toad has struggled with in the past. Now, nobody is isolated on a project - everyone on TMNT works together to get work done, and to ensure that work done to a high standard. We can all look at our work and know that we can take pride in our craftsmanship, and in the quality of our code.

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