Best Branching Strategies for Dev Teams
Explains why environment-based branching slows development, and recommends using feature flags and progressive rollouts for simpler, faster, and safer …
TL;DR; Supporting multiple versions in production drains engineering resources through increased context-switching, merge conflicts, and bug risks. Back-porting fixes and maintaining separate branches for each customer make things worse, leading to instability and technical debt. To avoid these problems, teams should simplify and standardise their branching strategy.
Supporting multiple versions in production is a hidden tax on engineering teams.
Every version adds:
Reverse integration—back-porting fixes to older versions—is even worse. It creates instability, increases the risk of unintended regressions, and wastes engineering time.
And then there’s branch by customer—the absolute worst-case scenario. Maintaining separate branches for each client is a scaling disaster, guaranteeing technical debt and a painful development experience.
If a team is struggling to keep track of where changes are applied, it’s already a sign that the branching strategy is broken. Standardise, simplify, and move forward—not backward.
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