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To Bundle or Not to Bundle, That’s a Great Question
The process and mechanism for promoting changes from one stage to the next can vary as you move from “left to right” in the pipeline. In the earlier (left) stages of the pipeline, you often want more flexibility to promote individual work items from one stage to the next. As you move to the later (right) stages of the pipeline, it’s often desirable to have more predictability and ability to version the sets of changes that are promoted and ultimately released.
DevOps Center allows you to define what this overall model of promotion looks like. The point in the pipeline when you transition from the more flexible/individually-selectable work item promotion to the more predictable/versioned promotion is referred to as the bundling stage. The bundling stage is where changes come together to be bundled into a work item bundle that can be versioned and promoted as a unit through the subsequent stages. When changes are promoted from the bundling stage to the next stage, all work items that have not yet been promoted are included in the versioned work item bundle and promoted as a unit. This versioned bundle continues to be promoted as a consistent unit through subsequent stages when you perform a promotion.
The bundling stage is defined when you configure the pipeline. All stages to the left of this stage allow for individual work item promotion, and all stages to the right of this stage allow for versioned work item bundle promotion.
Work Item Bundles Reduce Merge Conflicts
In the stages to the left of the bundling stage, you have increased flexibility regarding which work items can be promoted and when. However, this flexibility comes with the tradeoff of increased risk of conflicts and unanticipated behavior because the combination of changes in each stage can be inconsistent. The versioned work item bundle that is created in the bundling stage and promoted through subsequent stages provides improved consistency because the changes contained in it have been merged into a unit that you can promote consistently and predictably from stage to stage.
