Feature Branching - Taking the ‘Continuous’ Out Of Continuous Integration
Feature branch workflows appear to be the flavour of the month for software development right now. At its simplest, features are developed in isolation on their own branch, then merged back to the trunk. More complicated variants exist, most notably Git Flow . Git is undoubtedly a powerful versioning tool. It makes branching easy and reliable, and it is truly distributed. These capabilities open up a whole range of possibilities and workflows to support different ways of working. But, as usual, the sharper the tool, the easier it is to cut yourself if you don't understand what you are doing. My problem is this. Feature branching is a very effective way of working when you have a large, distributed team. Code is not integrated with the rest of the codebase without a lot of checking. Pull requests ensure changes - often done by developers who are in other countries, and often part of a loose-knit open source development team - are reviewed by a core team before being inte