Git workflow for a small team of developers and designers

Question

I'm getting lost with Git branching model and the workflow that I want to create for my team (developers + designers).

Suppose that the project is based on a MVC pattern, so we have a structure similar to :

Models/
Controllers/
Views/

Developers works on the M & C parts with some basic/generated views (Rails, Django or CakePHP app for example) and Designers works on the V part

How can I manage that developers works on M&C and keep some basic crappy views, and in the same time, designers make sexy views based on controllers actions coded and added by developers progressively ?

I tried to make it works with 3 branches :

master (production-ready)
dev
ui

but no idea how a designer working on ui branch can keep the code elsewhere than /views updated an a working app...

Thanks folks for help !

Answer 1

With git, there's no reason for developers to work on a separate branch or to have mocked up views. Have designers and developers work in the same branch, on the same codebase. When a view is done (or at least improved and not crashing) have the designer commit and push them to a master repository. The same is true for developers: when a local change is 'done', have them commit it and push it.

Before pushing, each side needs to pull (to ensure there are no conflicts). If the two groups are working in mutually-exclusive pieces of code (separate files or even separate parts of the same files), then the pull will simply update the local copy and all will work well.

With this, both sides are always seeing the most up-to-date codebase, and contributing directly towards the exact end goal, watching it evolve.

Answer 2

Git is so simple to use, theres no reason everyone should not have their own branch to work out of. Hell, thats one of the main reasons to use a version control system. In Git, commits are cheap.

Typically, we have a master, and anyone who is working on updates or features will branch from the master and branch a branch if need be, then a release master (someone like me) will take care of merging them all back down, checking for conflicts, testing the release and merging back to master.

As you work on it, others can receive your changes by doing a fetch/pull against your branch to pull in the changes.