The SnipFlow workflow

SnipFlow is a way of working for engineering teams, combining a great developer experience with a great experience for non-technical team members.

It’s easy and quick to set up on new projects (and most existing ones). It reduces technical admin and deployment risk while increasing productivity, quality and transparency; it’s free and easy to use, and most coders who’ve used it love it.

Using SnipFlow will allow your team to say goodbye to:

• “it works on my machine”
• “why on earth did they commit that code?”
• “can you put the latest version on a link for me?”
• “how do I run a deployment?”

It suits all types of teams but is most valuable in a studio environment. It builds on GitHub Flow to connect the dots between the tools you already use, so your team can focus on the work, not the admin.

SnipFlow uses automation and shared terminology; it connects version control, CI, issue tracking, hosting environments and even team chat into a cohesive way of working. It reduces technical admin and developer context switching, improves communication and transparency between all team members, and scales from side hustles to business critical product teams. You don’t need to licence it or (probably) use any new tooling to use it.

Tested by many teams over several years, the SnipFlow workflow results in improved developer onboarding, focus and productivity, more transparency for leads and managers, and easier rationalising about code during complex debugging. It is also completely free to adopt.

Read about how it works, jump straight into Getting started, or if you’re joining a team that already uses SnipFlow, skip to the onboarding section. Or to see an example of SnipFlow in action, browse the repo powering this website.

Why use SnipFlow?

There are many tools to help manage aspects of coders’ work, but most of them end up needing technical administration, often unexpectedly, which breaks a developer’s flow state. SnipFlow abstracts these tasks to automation systems and ChatOps, removing the onus from the individual developer.

Most out-of-the-box automation-based tooling is aimed at single developers and small projects; as these projects grow and the team realises that it could be improved, the switching cost is often already too high. SnipFlow provides a scalable workflow that suits both of these priorities, meaning less cognitive load for developers across various work, fewer process errors, and quicker onboarding for new team members.

The majority of the “just works” tooling available doesn’t connect very well to an overall project workflow; for example systems like GitFlow don’t connect happily to tools like Vercel that allow you to “push to a specific branch to deploy to a specific environment”. SnipFlow replaces the OOTB automations with custom CI scripts that are simple to understand and extend, but that support the wider workflow 100%.

Teams that use SnipFlow encounter drastically fewer situations where they are asked to do boring - and often risky - tasks when they could be productive.