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**Title**: Archipelagos in Git\\
**Proposer**: [[2015:Matthew Dodkins]]\\
**Type**: Presentation\\
**Duration**: 15 mins\\
**Description**: \\
Island: Any piece of subcontinental land that is surrounded by water.\\
Archipelago: Island chain, is a chain, cluster or collection of islands.\\
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Assumptions:\\
  * Reviewing code is a worthwhile activity
  * No one wants to review and/or merge code as their fulltime job
  * No one person should bear all that responsibility anyway
  * Existing, nonconceptual approaches to the problem of managing the movement of code are quite weak
  * Communication is always required and goes a long way to solving many of our problems, but we can't all communicate with everyone all the time on a medium large team
  * Metaphors help understand intent
  * Sometimes code will need to be shared between teams; it isn't always possible to divide up work by features (although appropriate interfaces help with this)

Basics:\\
  - An 'Island' is considered to be synonymous with a fork/branch or fork/set of branches
  - An archipelago is identifiable as a number of islands which are "close" to one another

  * Created as a concept to help medium to large teams manage sharing of code between areas of related work and to ease merge pain
  * Merging is always difficult; it's a difficult job. Archipelagos don't solve merge problems, but they do simplify them and provide conceptual assistance
  * Islands in an archipelago are related to one another purely by virtue of their proximity to one an another. If a fork/branch is close to another, it makes sense to consider it part of the same archipelago
  * Pull requesting to the owner of the archipelago simplifies the merge you're dealing with and still allows everyone interested in that archipelago to be party to what's going into it
  * Pull requesting the entire archipelago to "wherever the release is going to be made from" helps collate like­ areas of work for reviewing purposes

Advanced\\
  * Archipelagos can be near or far away from each other ­ sometimes they will want to merge between each other, but this is not particularly desirable unless you combine
  * How do we know when to create an archipelago?
  * Feature files / executable specification, where does it fit in?
  * Realisations from actual use with several teams totalling 20+ developers\\
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