The first change to be implemented was the agreement of a “development policy”, a document that described what would become the team’s set of “best practices”. Although this was not a piece of technical work it did serve as a high level requirements definition for the macro development work.
The development policy included statements concerning:
When, where and how to document the various kinds of projects and pipelines that the team worked on. Principally this consisted of guidelines to embed documentation within the various build files, XSLTs and Schematron files themselves.
A directive to move to Git as the version control system with VSTS as the repository.
Branch naming conventions (mostly following Git Flow, although that process was not used itself).
Guidance on common naming conventions for folders within repositories to make transferring to new projects easier.
Use of Semantic Versioning in projects and when to bump major, minor and patch numbers.
Deployment rules, such as only deploying from a “release” branch, not deploying with outstanding commits etc.
Use of pull requests to ensure at least some degree of code review and confirmation that documentation had been completed.
Setting up an environment separate from other teams where the content delivery team could deploy assets (the “Content Architecture Production Environment” or “CAPE”).