Branching workflows and release engineering

Now that we know about the different branching patterns and their purposes, let’s examine how they can be composed into different branching workflows. Different situations call for different uses of branches, as well as different policies. For example, smaller projects are better suited for simpler branching workflows, while larger projects might need more advanced ones.

In this section, we’ll describe how to use a few common workflows. Each workflow is distinguished by the various types of branches it uses. In addition to getting to know what the ongoing development looks like for a given workflow, we’ll also examine what it recommends doing at the time of the new release (major and minor, where relevant).

The release and trunk branches workflow

One of the simplest workflows is to use just a single integration branch. Such branches are sometimes called trunk branches; in Git, it would usually be the main or...