Best branching strategy when doing continuous integration?

Question

What is the best branching strategy to use when you want to do continuous integration?

1. Release Branching: develop on trunk, keep a branch for each rel

Answer 1

The way I see it you want to have a limited set of branches where you can focus. Since you want tests, code quality metrics, and many interesting things to run with the builds, having too many reports will probably get you to miss info.

When and what to branch, usually depends on the size of the team and the size of the features being developed. I don't think there is a golden rule. Make sure you use an strategy where you can get feedback early/often, and that includes having quality involved from the very beginning of the features. The quality bit, means that as you are automating as the team develops, if you branch for a large feature set a team is building, you gotta have quality involved in the team as well.

ps Where did you get those approach references? - doesn't feel that those graphs represent all the options

Update 1: Expanding on why I said it isn't a golden rule. Basically for relatively small teams I have found it best using an approach that is a mix. Feature branches are created if it is something long and part of the team will continue adding smaller features.