Version Control Branching Strategies
Why Branching Strategy Matters
Once more than one person touches a codebase, an ad-hoc approach to branches causes conflicts, broken deploys, and confusion about what’s actually in production. A clear strategy fixes that.
Git Flow
A structured model with dedicated branches:
main— always production-readydevelop— integration branch for the next releasefeature/*— individual features, branched from developrelease/*— final testing before merging to mainhotfix/*— urgent production fixes
Git Flow works well for products with scheduled releases, but is often too heavy for fast-moving web apps.
GitHub Flow (Simpler)
One rule: main is always deployable. Everything else is a short-lived feature branch merged via pull request.
git checkout -b feature/checkout-page # ...make changes, commit... git push origin feature/checkout-page # open a Pull Request, review, merge into mainTrunk-Based Development
Even simpler: everyone commits small, frequent changes directly to main (or very short-lived branches merged within a day), often behind feature flags so incomplete work doesn’t affect users.
Choosing a Strategy
| Team Size | Recommended |
|---|---|
| Solo / small team, continuous deploy | GitHub Flow |
| Scheduled releases, larger team | Git Flow |
| High-velocity teams with strong CI | Trunk-Based |
Practice Exercise
Simulate GitHub Flow: create a feature branch, commit a change, push it, and write out (in a text file) what a pull request description for it would say.
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