Today, almost all versions of control systems support branches that come from one central codebase. Branching makes way for developers to collaborate inside one central code base effectively.
Agile development is an interactive method of management that preserves a focus on the delivery of business. A good branching strategy agile development ensures your codebase stays healthy and governs how branches are created and used. The structure you choose affects how workflows between code branches. It also affects:
- What your development pipeline is all about
- When a business is to create a new branch
- The number of branches you will have
- Branches longevity
Branching creates a chance for the team of developers to participate in one central codebase. When changes made to the branch, it doesn’t affect other developers on the team. The underdevelopment features could lead to instability if all the work were happening on the main code.
Developers may ensure features on their private branch don’t deviate too far from the master.
Branching Strategies for Agile Teams
- Release Branching
In release branching, a team starts working on a new release and create a branch. Until the next release is made possible, all the work stored in this current branch.
Release branching strategy expected in the Scrummerfall and Waterfall type of development process. However, if you have many people working on the same branch, the release branching can be challenging to manage.
If a developer may do release branching, he/she should create a branch that is as close to the actual release as possible.
- Feature Branching
Feature branches coupled with feature flags or toggles; they enable or disable a feature within the product. They are used to collect a series of user stories merged into the master code to make one complete feature.
Feature branching reduces the time of delivery and testing. To make use of this strategy effectively, an organization must have minimal feature sets that are viable. An advantage of feature branching is that the code can remain within the build but remain inactive while developing.
- Task or Issue Branching
Task branching connects issues with the source code. The vital issue indicated in the branch name makes it easy to see which code implements specific issues. Concerning the agile centres around each user stories, story branching is ideal for organizations with a mature development process. With its level of transparency, it’s easier to apply specific changes to master or any running release branch. These tasks have broken down into small and reasonable functionality sets; this makes it easy to see which issues are in progress and ready for release.
Merging Strategies
Branches made to last for a short period, and this makes them easy to merge. Merging avoids critically prolonged, expensive merge conflicts. The three common merging strategies include:
- Manual code review and merge
- Minimal continuous integration
- Continuous integration pipelines
Automated testing and continuous integration are important. The first step is deciding which branch merge strategy is culturally and technically fit for your organization.
