Comments on: Branch-Per-Feature Source Control. Introduction

By: Jpt

Jpt — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:52:00 +0000

Nice Series, if you could finish: Database Considerations and Continuous Integration Per Branch, that will be awesome…

By: source control newbie

source control newbie — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:31:28 +0000

nice article. Totally agree with you on the Branch-Per-Feature Strategy. Looking forward to your 3~8 of this serial.

By: derick.bailey

derick.bailey — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:00:22 +0000

@Dhananjay,

I assume you mean branch per sprint or iteration? that’s an interesting variation. I think i’ll include that as an example in my next post (strategy) where I discuss what/when to branch and merge.

By: derick.bailey

derick.bailey — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:58:40 +0000

@Graham,

Only if you assume that you are working in large batches. Understanding how to size your work appropriately is an assumption that I’ve made in the first few posts, but am going to make a little more explicit in post #3 – strategy.

“Continuous Integration” is very often misunderstood, in my experience (not saying you misunderstand it… making observation about the development community, as a whole). In a future post, I’m going to outline how I do CI-Per-Branch… how i do true continuous integration, not just “continuous compilation and test execution” … which further mitigates the issue that you’re describing.

I certainly don’t want to claim that BPF is a magic silver bullet or anything like that. It’s good to know the circumstances in which it works best, and in which it fails.

thanks for the feedback. I need this kind of dissent and discussion. it helps facilitate the information that i put into the posts.

By: Graham

Graham — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:45:41 +0000

Isn’t the whole point of doing CI to remove the pain of doing large merges caused by working separately for long periods of time? In which case isn’t this a huge step backwards?

By: Dhananjay Goyani

Dhananjay Goyani — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:18:25 +0000

Its been few months now since we started following BPS – Branch Per Scrum. And that has made perfect sense in delivery and quality. Not just that, it has saved us a lot in terms of code versioning + tracking and review. All we have to take care at the time of merging the branched code with main branch.

By: jnappi

jnappi — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:02:21 +0000

We’ve actually been using what could be considered a branch per feature approach using Subversion (and CVS) before it for a couple of years now. It allows us to have numerous developers working on a variety of task simultaneously without impacting the trunk. It can be a little painful when it comes to to merge, and seem like overkill on smallish features but its working for us.

By: Robz

Robz — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:18:40 +0000

We’ve been doing BPF for awhile now and I have to say I’ve grown to love it.

Its also good for training new individuals on your systems. You create a sandbox branch and put in some bugs for them to find and fix.