Transitioning to Branching with TFS

Question

Our team is currently using plain old TFS 2005, no branching, shared checkouts etc... I would like to introduce a DEV/MAIN/PROD branching system similar to the basic flavor in the TFS Guidance document so that we can do some parallel dev, isolation, and firm up review and deployment processes.

I have read most of the whitepapers etc. Do you guys have any practical advice, suggested tools, gotchas or recommendation. Also, we plan to migrate to 2010 once it comes out - not sure if that would affect anything. I appreciate all the suggestions and help I can get as I am a branching neophyte.

Answer 1

My advise would be to keep your branching strategies simple. It's easy to get carried away and implement rather sophisticated branching strategies that require a whole team just to manage them.

I tend to go by with just a "main branch" and one (or many) "release branches". The main branch is where day to day development happens and the release branch is used to take a snapshot of the code before is pushed to production.

The main branch continues changing as the project evolves over time while the release branch is a way to go back to make a change to what's in production without risking including other on-going changes on the main branch. The release branch is used to make hot-fixes.

I've described this in more detail on my blog:

http://hectorcorrea.com/Blog/Simple-Branching-Strategies-for-Team-Foundation-Server