DevOps Learning: Branching Strategies

 When learning DevOps, I make it a goal to cover at least one topic each day. Today, I’m focusing on branching strategies. Based on my research and experience, I’ve noticed that many companies use the following structure, often managed through JIRA, a project tracking and issue management tool. JIRA helps teams track progress, visualize pending tasks, and understand team members’ contributions.

Branch Structure

  1. Master Branch ([prd])
  • This is the production branch where live code runs.
  • It’s the version of the application that users and clients interact with.

2. Staging Branch ([stg])

  • This branch is a copy of the master branch.
  • It serves as a testing environment where internal users test features before they’re pushed to production.
  • If testing is successful, changes are merged into the master branch.

3. Development Branch ([dev])

  • This is the main working branch for developers.
  • Developers create their own branches from this dev branch for specific tasks or tickets.
  • Developers work on their assignments, make commits, and push changes back to the dev branch.

Role of JIRA in Branching

JIRA plays a crucial role in tracking the progress of development tasks. Here’s how it’s used in this workflow:

Columns in JIRA

  • To Do / Tickets: New tasks or tickets are created and listed here.
  • In Progress: When a developer starts working on a task, they move it to this column.
  • Ready to Test: Once the work is complete, the task moves to this column, where QA tests it.
  • Merge to PRD: If the task passes testing, it’s ready to be merged into the production branch.

Example Workflow

  1. A new task, like working on a Docker file, is created in the To Do column.
  2. A new branch is created from the dev branch, named after the ticket ID (e.g., ticketID/docker-file).
  3. The developer works on the Docker file and moves the task to the In Progress column.
  4. Once completed, the task moves to the Ready to Test column, where QA tests it.
  5. If testing is successful, the changes are merged into the production branch (prd), and the task moves to the Merge to PRD column.

Hotfix Strategy

Sometimes, issues arise in the production (master) branch that need urgent attention. Here’s how hotfixes are handled:

  1. A new ticket is created in JIRA to document the issue.
  2. A new branch is created directly from the master branch, named after the ticket ID (e.g., ticketID/hotfix).
  3. The developer works on the hotfix and pushes the changes to this branch.
  4. Once the issue is resolved and tested, the branch is merged back into the master (prd) branch to ensure the fix goes live.


This approach keeps everything organized, aligns development efforts, and ensures that production issues are resolved quickly.

Here is the YouTube Link: https://youtube.com/@raeesq.?si=v_QK6Q2XXMf9mKep

Final Thoughts

This simple branching strategy, combined with JIRA’s tracking capabilities, helps ensure smooth collaboration and efficient development. It’s a systematic way to handle development, testing, and production changes. If you found this helpful, please share it with others and continue learning DevOps one step at a time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

📘 Understanding Prometheus in a Simple Way-Part 3 (For DevOps Beginners)

Image
 In our previous blogs, we have already covered: How to launch an EC2 instance (Link: https://medium.com/@raeesyaqubqazi/prometheus-and-grafana-project-part-1-by-raees-yaqoob-qazi-12eb5c431350 ) How to run our Notes App inside a Docker container (Link: https://medium.com/@raeesyaqubqazi/prometheus-and-grafana-project-part-1-by-raees-yaqoob-qazi-12eb5c431350 ) How to install cAdvisor to collect container-level metrics (Link: https://medium.com/@raeesyaqubqazi/monitoring-containers-with-cadvisor-part-2-of-my-previous-blog-series-cec2452b1ba5 ) Today, we will move one step ahead and learn Prometheus , which will collect the metrics generated by cAdvisor. 🔍 What Is Prometheus? Before understanding Prometheus, let’s talk about how data is stored in databases . ✔️ Relational Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) Data is stored in rows and columns  — like an Excel sheet. ✔️ Prometheus (TSDB — Time Series Database) Prometheus does NOT store data in tables.  It stores data in Time Series fo...
Read more

Grafana Setup & Dashboard Creation (Part-5)— Explained by Raees Yaqoob Qazi

Image
 Today, I’m going to talk about Grafana . Grafana is a powerful tool used to create dashboards and visualize data . As DevOps engineers, monitoring is very important, and Grafana makes it easy to understand system performance. Part-1:  https://brillertechnologies.blogspot.com/2025/11/prometheus-and-grafana-projectpart-1-by.html Part 2:  https://brillertechnologies.blogspot.com/2025/11/monitoring-containers-with-cadvisorpart.html Part 3:  https://brillertechnologies.blogspot.com/2025/12/understanding-prometheus-in-simple-way.html Part 4: https://brillertechnologies.blogspot.com/2025/12/understanding-prometheusmonitoring-made.html 1. Running Grafana Using Docker Compose First, I use Docker Compose to run Grafana. Open your docker-compose.yml file: vim docker-compose. yml Add the Grafana service: grafana: image: grafana/grafana-enterprise container_name: grafana restart: unless-stopped ports: - "3000:3000" Save and exit with:   :wq Then run: d...
Read more

My First Python Program: A Simple Calculator

Image
 Today, I am going to create a simple calculator using Python . This might be your first code ever , and honestly, this is also my first Python code . So don’t worry — we are learning together. Let’s start step by step. Step 1: Open VS Code First, open Visual Studio Code (VS Code) . Step 2: Create a Folder and a File Create a new folder (you can name it anything). Inside the folder, create a new file. In my case, I named the file first.py . 👉  .py is the file extension for Python , just like: .cpp for C++ .java for Java Step 3: Write the Python Code Now, write the following code in first.py : num1 = float ( input ( "Enter num 1: " ) ) # Taking first number from the user num2 = float ( input ( "Enter num 2: " ) ) # Taking second number from the user opr = input ( "Enter operator: " ) # User selects the operator (+, -, *) if opr = = "+" : # If operator is + output = num1 + num2 if opr = = "-" : # If operator is - ...
Read more