To Branch or Not to Branch?

This session discussed whether no not code should be branched and its impact on CI.

Don't branch!

• Jeff Frederick: "Branching is deferred integration" You are deferring the discovering of problems. There is a deliberate choice of stability over early discovery of problems.
• The only needs to branch are habit and because the tools make it possible
• Everyone thinks all the time. Any commits go to prod

Good Reasons to Branch

• Feedback on multiple commits
• Branching structure mirrors org strucutre, so if one branch goes red, you know.
• If you're devoliping something that's not a web app and users subscribe to a release / dev channel (ie. Firefox)
• Need a version deployed to a separate environments for separate business purposes
• To backport features and forward port bugfixes.

Additional Topics Discussed

• Use feature toggles
• A few examples of how branching works in
• Jenkins will kick off tests and only promote to the QA if the tests pass.
• Pipe Organ theory if there is one branch