Get Policy Availability in BitBucket Repo to Have a Build (Azure DevOps Build etc.) Validating a Pull Request

 You can setup Build pipelines in BitBucket itself or even Azure DevOps builds to validate an incoming pull request to a stable branch such as master/main. You might want to setup some KPIs to validate availability of such build for PR validation. For such requirements you may have to obtain data from BitBucket API to check if a build validation policy exists for the stable branches in your repos. Let's see how we can get such data from BitBucket APIs.

Cross Repo Branch Policies in Azure Git Repos

Azure Git repos provide protection to branches with branch policies. The cross-repo branch policy in a team project now lets you define policies applicable to a branch pattern, where it would even be applied to future branches which are adhering to the specified pattern. Let’s explore this feature in bit of detail.

Copy Azure Git Repo Branch Policies from One Branch to Another

Some teams when they practice Agile sprints keep a branch for the life of the sprint. In this case they do branch to develop features, make pull requests to sprint branch and release from the sprint branch at the end of the sprint. It is important to protect the sprint branch from incoming pull requests with policies. Since, there is no out of the box way to copy over the policies defined in one branch to another, each sprint the policies need to be created for the new sprint branch, which makes it a cumbersome process. In order to make it possible to copy set of policies defined in a branch to another, in Azure Git repos, now you can use the script made available here.

Implementing Simple and Effective Branching and Deployment Strategy with Azure DevOps

In the previous post, we have discussed, a simple and effective branching and deployment strategy as a concept. Let’s now have a look at key implementation considerations of the proposed strategy with Azure Git repos and Azure Pipelines.
Let’s have a look at pictorial representation of the proposed strategy first.

Simple and Effective Branching and Deployment Strategy

While using Git repos there many standard branching strategies teams follow. With this post let’s discuss a simple to understand and execute branching and deployment strategy, which supports most of the requirements, a software development and delivery team requires. The following implementation is considering the Azure Git Repos and Azure Pipelines in Azure DevOps. However, you might be able to implement the same with other Git repos and CI/CD tools.

Controlling Pull Request Source Branches for Given Target Branch in Azure Git Repos

Generally you can create pull request from any given source branch to a any given target branch in Azure Git repos. You can setup a pull request validation build which evaluates the repo state, by performing a pre merge in the build server to ensure, your repo build succeeds after the pull request is merged to the target branch. You can set the branch policies so that the pull request cannot be merged to a given target branch if the validation build fails or if the approvers not approve the pull request. However, you might want to follow a branching strategy, which requires you to control from which branches a pull request can be created and merged to a targeting branch. The purpose of controlling the pull request source and target would be to assure your team is adhering to a defined branching and merge strategy. Let’s look at using a task in pull request validation build to ensure the request is coming from an allowed/valid branch, and make the build to fail if it is coming from an invalid branch.

Inspecting Most Frequently Changed Files in Azure Git Repos

When analyzing an application with its telemetry data we would be looking at usage of the application, and would be able to identify which parts of the system is often used. Wouldn’t it be nice to compare that with the most frequently updated areas of the system? Let’s look at how we can get this information via Azure DevOps REST API.