Git branching strategy integated with testing/QA process

Question

Our development team has been using the GitFlow branching strategy and it has been great !

Recently we recruited a couple testers to improve our software quality. Th

Answer 1

Before test, we merge the changes from the develop branch to the feature branch

No. Don't, especially if 'we' is the QA tester. Merging would involve resolving potential conflicts, which is best done by developers (they know their code), and not by QA tester (who should proceed to test as quickly as possible).

Make the developer do a rebase of his/her feature branch on top of devel, and push that feature branch (which has been validated by the developer as compiling and working on top of the most recent devel branch state).
That allows for:

• a very simple integration on the feature branch (trivial fast-forward merge).
• or, as recommended by Aspasia below in the comments, a pull request (GitHub) or merge request (GitLab): the maintainer does a merge between the feature PR/MR branch and develop, but only if not conflict are detected by GitHub/GitLab.

Each time the tester detects bug, he/she will report it to the developer and delete the current feature branch.
The developer can:

• fix the bug
• rebase on top of a recently fetched develop branch (again, to be sure that his/her code works in integration with other validated features)
• push the feature branch.

General idea: make sure the merge/integration part is done by the developer, leaving the testing to the QA.