Version Control

Versioning for the Processes is automatic in Frends. Everytime a change is made, be it to Process, Subprocess or API, a version change is included for that object. This makes sure that no matter what, a traceable and backtrackable path of changes is always available, and the included versioning tools will help in identifying what was changed.

Semantic Versioning

Frends follows Semantic Versioning system, where the version is presented as three incremental numbers: major version, minor version and build or patch version. When any changes are made to the Processes or APIs, the build version is incremented automatically and the increment is enforced to avoid skipping values and also to make sure it will not overlap with earlier versions.

Major and minor version numbers can be changed as needed for your use case. Common scheme in Frends would be to increment the major version whenever a new featureset or other major change in a Process is deployed to production, while minor version could be incremented for a smaller change, such as bug fix or adjustment to the Process, after it has been deployed to production at least once.

The scheme is not enforced however, so you are free to use the version numbers as needed.

Version tools

The most important tool and view for versioning in Frends is the Process Changelog. From here, you can see all the versions and changes that have been made to a Process, and where those versions are deployed to. In addition, as long as the developers have followed the guidelines, a version comment or description is shown here for each version, explaining in simple words what was done for that version.

To get a further look at what was done between versions, it's possible to view and compare the older versions as well. Simply by clicking on the ellipsis for any version and selecting Edit, you can access the old version in the Process Editor to see its details. For older versions the Editor opens in view-only mode, and you need to restore the old version as the latest version in order to continue editing from there.

Frends also includes a Diff tool to compare different versions of a Process easily. It will highlight any new shapes, removed shapes as well as changed shapes, and you can get an easy overview on what changed between versions.

If you need to go back to editing an older version of a Process, changing versions is made easy and possible as well, and without drawbacks. When changing the version of a Process to earlier state, it will copy that version and make a new version from it, without overriding the changes made in between.