What branching strategy should I use during the development/maintenance of a web application?

Question

I am trying to decide on the best branching strategy for a web application project. Here is what I have come up with until now and I would greatly appreciate any comments and experiences.

The way I see it there are two main branching strategies: "branch by release" and "branch by feature".

"Branch by release": Development takes place on the trunk. When the time for a release is near, a branch is made for that release. This branch is then stabilized/tested and finally a release is made. After the release, the branch is merged back into the trunk, while keeping the release branch alive for bug-fixing. Is a bug-fix applied, then it is merged into the trunk ( if the development on the trunk hasn't eclipsed the bug in other means). New features are added to the trunk and don't affect the release branch. When a new release time nears, a new release branch is created a.s.o.

"Branch by feature": The trunk is always the "production" trunk (the code that is live). Bugfixes are commited directly to the trunk. Features for the next release are developed in feature branches.Bugfixes are merged from time-to-time into the feature branches. When release time comes, the features branches are merged into the trunk and the cycle of life continues.

Now the way I see it the big practical difference between these two strategies is that "by release" allows you to maintane different production versions of you software ( when client A has version 1 and client B version 1.5, client is the paying customer in this case). In contrast using the "by feature" strategy you can only support the current production version ( all clients are using latest version).

Since in a typical web application all clients are using the same "latest" version (since they all access the same server), I would assume that the "by feature" approach is the most commonly used. It removes the need to merge "across the hierarchy", say when a bugfix has to be applied to all 3 release versions.

So my current status is that I should go with "branch by feature". If it matters, my team is not very skilled.

Answer 1

If you only have one release live at any time, and you do all development in a single feature branch, then these approaches are effectively the same.

If branch-by-feature to you means having a several branches on the go at once, i'd avoid it like the plague. More branches means more merging, which is a pain in itself, and more integration hell. It's far better to do continuous integration to a single codeline.

If your deployment process is any more involved than branch, test, go live, then an advantage of branch-by-release is that you can have multiple release branches going at once, in different phases: one live and being bugfixed as necessary, and another one being stabilised, tested, going through acceptance, etc, while development continues on the trunk. If you have a live trunk, on the other hand, once you merge a feature branch in with a view to taking it live, you've lost your ability to do bugfixes to the current live system. The feature branch merge becomes a point of no return.