Code of practice
The IATI technical team follows a code of practice when developing and maintaining software:
- We should know which code is ‘ours’: when possible, IATI code should be a part of the IATI GitHub.
- Projects and code should be appropriately branded. Please email the IATI technical team for branding guidelines: support@iatistandard.org
- Projects and code should be in version control and present links to issue trackers and source code.
- Code should have a document, roadmap, estimate of resources and a licence.
- Projects should make use of Semantic Versioning.
- Updates to IATI code must not break existing functionality, except where permitted by semantic versioning practices.
- Deployed code should be on servers available to the IATI technical team.
- Status of software should be indicated in deployments: development, staging and live versions should be properly identified.
- When possible, code should log details about its usage.
- Developers should be able to find help and useful resources easily.
- We should protect our users’ privacy and ensure our code is secure.
- Projects should have continuous integration and testing with appropriate tools
- Projects should make use of appropriate tools to ensure that dependencies are updated when possible.
Our Gitflow
- Repositories should contain protected main and develop branches.
- Bug fixes and feature work should be branched off from the dev branch.
- Pull requests from these branches are then made to the dev branch.
- Code reviews for pull requests are made in local environments.
- The develop branch is deployed and tested in a development environment or server.
- Once the feature branches have been merged, deployed and tested in the development environment, a pull request can be made from the develop branch to the main branch.
- The main branch is then deployed to the live environment when a GitHub Release is created.
- Only the main branch should be deployed to live environments.
- Urgent hotfixes can have pull requests done to the main branch and this should be undertaken only by the IATI Technical Team.
- Content and general use reviews should be done in a development environment, built using the development branch.