Operations on DEV

Code

Given the fact that all new features and/or bugs are developed on separate branches, DEV is the place where they are actually tested by the developer itself and by the tester(s).

The tester is able to change a specific (development/bug fixing) branch from the branch selector in SVN box of the main screen.

Since this is the first place where the code gets deployed, it is the less stable in the workflow.

The database data on DEV is usually a minimized replica of the data from the production and it is not used for performance and/or load testing. At this point only the functional part of the feature/bug is being checked.

Database

Everytime the versioning system is being executed, some particular actions are taking place. Please note however that CodePax does not require the DB changes to be applied with every switch/update operation.
CodePax will compare the change scripts found on that specific branch with the latest version found in the database.

Steps:
1. (optional) the test data is being saved
2. the database is emptied(drop and create DB)
3. the baseline is applied
4. the change scripts are being applied
5. the test data is being loaded
6. the data change scripts are being applied

Note: by checking the "preserve test data" checkbox, the data currently in DB will be exported and uploaded to SVN on the current branch.

Because we can have multiple developers working on the same code base, on different development branches, and because all of them will need to test their code on the DEV machine, we can end-up with some incompatible database changes from one branch to another. That is why we chose to completely drop and re-create the database in the DB versioning process.

The versioning system will search and apply all change scripts that are higher than the latest baseline available on that branch. So, it will ignore the version number found in the z_db_versioning table. In fact this is the only environment where the z_db_versioning is being ignored.