tons of features being worked on at once) then you'll see better results from splitting it up into separate autonomous components than you will from papering over the problem with source control.

If developers can't successfully merge into this branch (which only needs to build, not run flawlessly) at least once a day, then you have a quality/discipline problem and not a revision control problem covering it up by using non-integrated developer branches only defers the problem, and by doing so, actually makes the eventual merges a lot more painful and unstable than they really need to be.įeature branches aren't the worst, but IMO very few projects are actually big enough to warrant them if your project is very large (i.e. If you absolutely must defer integration in order to protect the stability of the master branch, the typical, proven model is to use an unstable branch - sometimes called a development branch, as described in A successful Git branching model. Just pull, merge locally, and run commit tests before you push, it's simple. Git handles merges so effortlessly most of the time that remote developer branches are just unnecessary overhead. I'm currently part of a group of about 35 contributors divided into 4 separate teams, most people check in at least 2-3 times a day, some people 10-15 times it's unusual to see builds broken and extremely rare for them to stay broken for more than a few minutes. Most organizations should be integrating very frequently - as in, several times per day. It especially doesn't make sense with git, because every developer already technically has his/her own repository. Unless you're actually working in a geographically distributed team with a need to 'gate' changes from outside developers, the branch-per-developer model really doesn't make much sense. I don't want this to be a rant about why you need CI, but it's clear from your question that you know you aren't integrating your changes often enough, so IMO there's no point in dancing around the issue. These teams generally try to use developer branches as a way to protect the stability of the mainline, and the result is - typically - a long and very painful merge period before the release, followed by an even longer and more painful stabilization period, which sometimes doesn't happen until after the release. Teams and organizations which do not have continuous integration and a track record of instability in their deployments, or worse, instability in their builds. This makes life more difficult for contributors, but much easier for the maintainers, which of course is exactly the point, and this is a very successful model on GitHub. The open-source community, where these branches are actually repository forks, so that project maintainers can lock down access to the master repository and require integration through pull requests. I've seen developer branches used in two main scenarios:

Branch from master git