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.
Each classification [Concepts, Categories, & Tags] was assigned using AI-powered semantic analysis and scored across relevance, depth, and alignment. Final decisions? Still human. Always traceable. Hover to see how it applies.
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.
Teleplan
DFDS
Emerson Process Management
Trayport
Deliotte
Flowmaster (a Mentor Graphics Company)
Sage
Genus Breeding Ltd
Jack Links
Akaditi
Illumina
Big Data for Humans
Slaughter and May
Workday
Kongsberg Maritime
Philips
Graham & Brown
Alignment Healthcare
Washington Department of Enterprise Services
Nottingham County Council
Ghana Police Service
Royal Air Force
Washington Department of Transport
New Hampshire Supreme Court
Big Data for Humans
Teleplan
Workday
Alignment Healthcare
Emerson Process Management
Healthgrades