How to review changes made by fellow developer

Need help App Organization
1

Hi,

I have got a developer in my team to work on my Bubble app. However, I would like to review the changes he makes before making them live.

Apart from me asking him what all changes he made, and relying on his memory, is there any more reliable and better way of reviewing the changes he has made?

Thanks,
Mukesh

2

Hi there, @mghatiya… you could use the version control feature if you are on a plan that supports it, but even then, you wouldn’t know exactly what changes the developer made without them pointing you in the right direction. To the best of my knowledge, there really isn’t a good Bubble-related solution here, and you are likely going to want the developer to keep some sort of change log so you can review their changes before deploying them to live.

Best…
Mike

3

Tell them to put their name in beginning of every page, workflow, data type and field they create. Then you can search the app using their name.

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4

Thanks @mikeloc and @boston85719

@mikeloc Like you sid, Version Control seems more for maintaining two different versions. However, there doesn’t seem a good way to see what is the difference between two versions. And to see what has been changed. People are not good at keeping log of what they have done. In traditional programming, people don’t even write comments on what they have done. Imagine people making a note of each change they are making, each change they are undoing etc.

@boston85719 thanks. This seems quite cumbersome and error prone though.

I am surprised that others don’t face this issue as I don’t see forum threads on this topic. Is it that in most of the Bubble applications there is just one person maintaining the application? Even the big apps which are on production plan, dedicated plans etc? Surely, they would have many developers. How would they manage this simple code review step which is the core of typical software development.

5

I’m thinking that’s part of it, but more than that, I’m wondering if code reviews (which, to your point, are an important part of the software development process) are simply a bridge that the no-code world hasn’t really approached (let alone begun to cross) yet. I would guess most folks are kind of winging it on that front or they have a pretty heavy-handed manual process in place. I’m also guessing that at this stage of the no-code game, most folks who are working with others have developed relationships where they trust the folks with whom they are working to the point where they don’t feel they need to review every change that is being made.

Anyway, just some additional thoughts there on what I think is an interesting topic.

6

 
I believe there’s on ongoing effort at Bubble to improve that. From the latest community update…

-Steve

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7

It is very important to know exact changes that people have made and review them. Can’t rely on people’s memories or them correctly labeling things. Here are a couple of examples on how things went wrong in my application when a new developer worked on it.

  • Person was checking a page on how it is implemented. He clicked on one text element which was part of a group and checked whether there is a workflow by clicking on “start/edit workflow”. He saw that nothing is there and left it. He felt he didn’t do any change, but what ended up happening is that he created an empty workflow for click on that text. Now that broke the click action of its parent group as the action on clicking that text was an empty workflow!
  • Person edited the style itself instead of either creating a new style or by removing the style of an element and then changing it.

These are inadvertent changes and person may not even realise. That’s why code reviews are important so that such things can be caught.

I have no idea how others are managing it, especially in the plans where people can have up to 15 collaborators!

I can’t even manage one developer right now unless I have a feature to review the changes made by other person.

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