Imagine this, a developer works for 3 days on a new feature, after several iterations it finally works.
Now there are three things we normally do when we just code:
Double check every change, making sure that we didn’t do harm to other functionality.
Take another look at every change, maybe we can eliminate some of them.
Usually a manager is overlooking all changes, making sure it complies with our guidelines.
Only then we deploy the new feature to live.
But I don’t see any way to actually see a list of changes that has been made in the app. Only general save points.
Even when I click on the ‘undo’ button I have to do it blindly, hoping I’m not undoing anything that is out of my view.
This is an interesting observation and something that couldn’t hurt if added as a feature.
My first two thoughts were this:
Bubble kind of doesn’t need this because it automatically changes old code to match your new code. For example, changing the name of an element will change it in all of the associated workflows without you having to do it manually. This usually prevents new changes from breaking other pages.
I haven’t come across a need for this yet through 4 months of consistent development. I do remember one time where I “undid” a change on another page and couldn’t for the life of me remember what I undid. But it wasn’t a huge deal.
Again, couldn’t hurt to be added. Definitely could see a history log of changes helping larger development teams.
Generally, developers should be committing to the feature branch often. And the feature branch merged via a pull request as frequently as possible. Ideally everyday.
Bubble doesn’t have feature nor pull request merges, but the same level of frequent commits can happen and should happen.
I’m less concerned about code that breaks, as this is generally covered by the issue finder.
When you build alone, it isn’t so necessary to see a list of the changes you’ve done.
Once I gave someone else to continue working on an app I built, I need to overlook the changes to see that nothing is done twice and that the logic make sense. especially when that someone is just starting his way around Bubble.
And a list of changes for when you “undo” wouldn’t hurt as well.
This is the exact issue that I’m running into as well. When adding developers into Bubble, I need to make sure I can track their changes and make sure they didn’t sneak in a change somewhere that breaks a feature without knowing it.
Currently, I’m trying to use Jira to have the devs log all changes manually, but really need an automatic way to do this. Has anyone looked into this further?
This is real blocker for building something substantial with Bubble.
I have an idea on how to overcome this limitation, but I haven’t tried it.
Under Settings > General > Export application you can get a JSON file outlining everything in your app.
You can use git or other version control to monitor the changes of this files every time you want to push a change, seems like a bit of manual work, but might do if it’s a deal breaker.
