Mature Branching Plan

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The VSTS Rangers TFS Branching Guidance II discusses three branching plans: basic, standard, and advanced. I like to separate the branching discussion into two parts: development branch considerations and release branch considerations. All three branch plans in the guidance have the same plan on the development side (a single development branch from main). These plans primarily differ with respect to the features and therefore the complexity of the release side of the plan. I have received several questions dealing with extending the branch plan and the process with working with these plans.

In this and subsequent posts I want to propose some concepts around a mature branching plan such as the one illustrated in the following branch hierarchy from TFS 2010:

 

mature Source Tree (1)

 

The next diagram shows the physical layout of this mature branching plan:

mature Source Tree (3)

In future posts, I will discuss the mature branching plan in further detail. Feel free to ask questions along the way.

Bill Heys