Development and Support

In a structured development environment, such as the one offered by GitFlow, it is crucial to differentiate between activities related to software development and those focused on production monitoring and support. These two areas, although interconnected, represent distinct workflows that must be managed effectively to ensure the stability of the product in production and the continuous evolution of the system.

MVP development

Important

This process aims to drive product development forward while maintaining quality through multi-stage testing.

The development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) focuses on building the key features that deliver value to the customer. This process includes:

Planning and Development: Where the team works on new features through feature branches (feature/) and prepares the necessary changes for the next release.

Integration and QA phases: Before going into production, the functionalities go through local integration testing and beta testing. Here, the QA team and the customer, represented by the Business Analyst (BA), validate that the MVP meets the functional and quality requirements.

Release: Once approved, the MVP is merged into the master/main branch and deployed in production.

Support and Monitoring

Important

The main challenge in this model is to balance efforts between developing the next MVP and fixing issues in production.

This approach allows the team to move into the future while maintaining product quality and functionality in the present.

Once the MVP is in production, the process of continuous monitoring and support begins:

Hotfixes: They represent critical fixes that must be implemented quickly in the production version. These fixes, managed in hotfix branches (hotfix/), ensure that critical issues identified by the customer or end users are resolved without affecting ongoing development.

Parallel Support: While the team is working on the next MVP (e.g., MVP2), part of the team can focus on supporting MVP1 in production. This approach ensures that the production application remains stable, even while new features are being developed.