Forum Discussion

testbuilder's avatar
testbuilder
Contributor
4 years ago
Solved

What is the best branching strategy

Hi    We are a team of 3 testers and we have been having merge conflicts in NameMapping files while checking in the code in Azure Repos   We usually try to avoid working on the same test cases to...
  • Marsha_R's avatar
    Marsha_R
    4 years ago

    The team strategy we used to keep the name mapping straight is to only let one person check it in.   Once every couple of weeks or so, depending on how much work is being done, one person would collect name mapping files from everyone and use an empty project to merge them inside TestComplete.  Then that name mapping is passed back to everyone and they make a backup copy of their own file and then try their tests with the new one.  Once everyone is happy with the new one, it is checked in.   This was rotated amongst the team members so no one got stuck with it all the time.  This also served to make sure that no one's name mapping got changed without their knowledge.

     

     

  • AlexKaras's avatar
    AlexKaras
    4 years ago

    Hi,

     

    I am third to Marsha after Benoit 🙂

    In general, test automation is a development process, so the generic development workflow should work for automation as well.

    The case is that NameMapping file should be treated as the binary one for all version control systems and should not be merged using their means.

    I heard several times that NameMapping merging provided by TestComplete works (and Marsha confirmed this on more time) but never heard that merging by any version control system provided a good result.

     

Marsha_R's avatar
Marsha_R
Champion Level 3
4 years ago

The team strategy we used to keep the name mapping straight is to only let one person check it in.   Once every couple of weeks or so, depending on how much work is being done, one person would collect name mapping files from everyone and use an empty project to merge them inside TestComplete.  Then that name mapping is passed back to everyone and they make a backup copy of their own file and then try their tests with the new one.  Once everyone is happy with the new one, it is checked in.   This was rotated amongst the team members so no one got stuck with it all the time.  This also served to make sure that no one's name mapping got changed without their knowledge.

 

 

  • sonya_m's avatar
    sonya_m
    SmartBear Alumni (Retired)
    4 years ago

    This is a great question testbuilder !

     

    Marsha, thank you for this informative reply. Let's see if we can get more people to share their ideas here🙂

     

    tristaanogre Reshail cunderw BenoitB AlexKaras , what do you guys think?

    • BenoitB's avatar
      BenoitB
      Community Hero
      4 years ago

      We dont use name mapping.

      We don't do testing with dev but we do test for final customer, far away of dev team.

      We use OOP approach with closure implementation.

      Every business method is an object of a parent object of the software tested.

       

      Sorry cannot help you but imho the Marsha_R way is the good one. Always reduce the complexity of the control to be done.

  • Vars01's avatar
    Vars01
    Occasional Contributor
    3 years ago

    Marsha_R 

    Just a quick doubt related to Merging. I am facing conflicts not only in Name Mapping but also we have some more files like 

    DecisionNG.tcCfgExtender

    DecisionNG_Automation.mds.tcLS

     

    how should we work with these file.Should we merge this manually or with some tool and replace it and then try to push in version control? Can you suggest on the same