Gnat has written this excellent break down on the various bits of advice your can find on branching strategies.
There's not one branching strategy, it's what works for:
- Your team size
- Your product and the lifecycle periods
- The technology you're using (web, embedded, windows apps)
- Your source control, e.g. Git, TFS, Hg
Jeff Atwood's post breaks down a lot of possibilities. Another to add is the concept of promotion (from Ryan Duffield's link). In this setup you have a dev branch, test bracnh and release branch. You promote your code up until it reaches the release branch and is deployed.
