Development process

Step 2: Make Your Changes

With your branch created, you're ready to make the changes you wish to contribute. This could involve fixing bugs, adding new features, or updating documentation. Ensure your changes are concise and focused on a single area of improvement. Adding multiple changes increases the complexity of the work that has to be later reviewed. Keeping changes very focused on one thing makes it a lot easier for your reviewers.

Making Changes

  1. Understand the scope: Before starting, clearly understand what needs to be changed or fixed. When you're addressing an issue from Notion, review the description and any related discussions to fully understand the problem or requirement. If you have any concerns or questions, please reach out to the project owner or the team to avoid delays. This will help avoid divergence or getting to deep into a solution that may not be the right one.

  2. Work Incrementally: Make small, incremental changes. This not only makes your changes easier to review but also reduces the risk of introducing bugs. Test your changes locally as you go to ensure they work as expected.

  3. Write Clear Code: Write code that is clean and easy to understand. Use meaningful variable and function names, and include comments where necessary to explain the purpose of complex or non-obvious code blocks.

  4. Write Tests: You should write tests to cover the code you've written. See testing. These newly created tests should all pass when the feature/defect is ready for review.

Committing Your Changes

  1. Commit Often: Commit your changes often with clear, concise commit messages. Each commit should represent a logical unit of work. This makes the history easier to understand and debug if something goes wrong.

    git add .
git commit -m "A descriptive message explaining the change"

  2. Write Good Commit Messages: A good commit message should summarize the change in the first line (50 characters or less), followed by a blank line and a more detailed explanation if necessary. Describe why the change is being made and how it addresses the issue.

  3. Keep Commits Focused: Each commit should be focused on a single change. Avoid including unrelated changes in the same commit, as this makes it harder to understand the purpose of the commit and can complicate the review process.

  4. Review Your Changes Before Pushing: Use git diff or a graphical Git tool to review your changes before pushing them. This is a good opportunity to catch any mistakes and ensure that only the intended changes are included in the commit.

    git diff <file-name>

  5. Push Your Changes: Once you are satisfied with your changes and commits, push them to your branch on the remote repository.

    git push origin <your-branch-name>

By following these guidelines, you ensure that your contributions are well-organized, easy to review, and free of unnecessary errors, making the development process smoother for everyone involved.