This document describes the release process that should be followed when working on features within our development life cycle.
Bug fixes and new features are developed and merged into the main branch. These changes are manually released to the development and/or staging environments using Azure release pipelines. While the general commit messages do not matter as much, the commit message created when squashing and merging to main is used to generate changelog notes. As a result, it is important to follow the commit message standard defined in the Development Processes document.
When a new feature is being developed, a new branch should be created from main and named using the following convention: feat/<feature-id>/<feature-name>. The feature branch should be used, in conjunction with sub-feature branches to develop the new functionality. Once the feature is complete the branch can be released to the development or staging environment for QA validation. Once validated and approved, the feature branch can be merged into main using a fast forward and rebase commit. And released to staging and production environments.
When the pull-request is merged into main, a fast forward and rebase commit should be used to preserve the commit messages used for generating the changelog. Once merged the main branch can be validated on staging and once approved released to production.