[Bf-committers] Development process reminder

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hey everyone,

Now that we are merging blender2.8 into master and are in the Beta phase,
we need to be more disciplined. Many developers are of course already aware
of this, but here is a reminder of what helps the development process run
smoother.

Sustainably growing this project and the developer team requires everyone
to think of their impact on the process as a whole. When you think "we'll
break this temporarily and fix it at an unknown later date" or "someone
else will probably fix it", don't do it. It makes reliable planning
impossible, both for yourself and other developers affected.

If you commit something, you are responsible for finishing it and handling
bugs. If you do not have time for that, you should take on fewer projects.
Try to work in a way where you deliver truly finished, documented,
incremental improvements in steps that take no more than a week or two.
Split up bigger projects into such incremental steps to keep them
manageable.

Do not commit changes that improve one thing, but then break other
functionality. There are users that need things to work, and plans often
fall through. If it happens by accident, either fix it quickly or revert
the changes. If you commit big or risky changes, do it at the start of your
workday, and monitor your mail / IRC to see if anything got broken.

Make an effort to test your changes and analyze what they could break.
Fixing a bug while you are working on the feature is much more efficient
than doing it weeks or months later.

Write clear commit logs, really follow the guidelines on the wiki. Document
changes immediately in the release notes. It's often hard to understand
what changed on a user level from reading commit logs. If you spent hours
working on something, you should take the small extra amount of time to
explain it well.
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Style_Guide/Commit_Messages

Thanks,
Brecht.