Comment by fhwang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fhwang | Hacker News Reader

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Branching can often be a good strategy if you have a large team and you don't want large uncompleted chunks of work to block quick fixes & deploys, etc. The situation you want to avoid is:

1. Engineers A & B are working on a medium-sized story that's not really done yet, but is in master anyway 2. Somebody discovers a small but critical bug in production 3. Engineer C can write a bugfix very soon, but can't deploy it to production because the other story isn't done yet.

But if your team never ends up saying "I'd deploy that but master isn't clean right now due to different changes", you probably just don't need to branch that much. Maybe your team is smallish or maybe you're capable of always breaking up work into really small increments. It really depends on everybody's situation.

Github does something sort of like this internally: http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html

Branching is more overhead in some circumstances but I've also found they can make things much easier. But I also wish that more people were comparing strategies and trade-offs because this stuff gets subtle and there are really lots of ways to do it.

We faced this situation before. What we do is: - When there is a feature that is not done yet, but has some user-facing code, we use feature toggler to disable it on production - we deploy quick fix by doing a cherry-pick

We discussed about branching a while ago to solve this problem more effectively but still not satisfied with the pros vs cons. For us, branching only makes sense if we switch to use branching completely, and thats quite a big change.

Yeah, personally I know a number of solid devs who like feature toggling but the notion has always rubbed me the wrong way. Especially because half the time I'm adding a non-trivial feature, I'm always semi-refactoring the code underneath to deal with the common patterns and concepts that emerge as a result of that addition. But I'm a big refactoring-as-you-go kind of person--I don't know how common this is.

Branching is definitely a significant investment for a team. It's best done when you've got somebody in-house who can guide everybody through the etiquette and how to use git to best support it. And if you want to do it all the way then you want to support in multiple places in your development stack -- QA servers, staging servers, CI, etc.

But for large units of work that genuinely should stay out of master -- large user-flow rewrites, big code refactorings or database migrations -- I find it a great way to have significant experimentation off to the side and then bring it back into master when it's ready for prime-time.

this was a question I had - how do you have your QA,testing,staging setup to test branches ? Or is fast and frequent commits (by design) eliminate the need for the commit-deploy-test cycle and replace it with a review step instead ?

Generally speaking I like to have at least one CI environment available for every branch that makes you nervous, plus master. So what number you're dealing with depends on the team. Sometimes you have eight engineers but only four of them are doing something major at any given time.

Of course, whatever you call what you deploy to production -- master, production, timestamp tagging, etc -- it should ideally pass CI before getting deployed as well. And there are merge conflicts to deal with, too -- that ideally belongs to whoever's doing branching.

So, maybe my ideal workflow looks like this:

  * Branch away from master
  * As you work in your branch, grab a CI server if you feel like it (telling
    everyone else)
  * Commit code in your branch, keeping an eye on your CI as you go
  * Periodically merge in from master, dealing with merge conflicts in your branch,
    *not* in master
  * When you feel like it's ready to go, get whatever review you feel like you
    need -- code review, product manager review, etc
  * If you feel 99% certain it's good, merge it into master and push that back to
    origin
  * Wait for master CI to pass
  * Deploy to production
  * Beer

From an etiquette point of view, there are things that can go wrong, not least the individual commitment to deal with merge conflicts before they get involved in master. And conflict resolution cannot be rushed. If you have engineers who are just gonna edit files randomly to get git to accept their merge, you're going to have problems. (But if you have those sorts of engineers, you already have problems.)

Out of curiosity, do you work for a relatively small company? I ask because I can't imagine this scaling particularly well, with production code containing a large number of "dead" code paths that you have to cross reference with your feature toggler to check on their status.

Do you feel like you gain anything significant from your method (apart from the simpler git interaction from having just one developer branch)?

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