What branching strategy should I use during the development/maintenance of a web application?

Question

I am trying to decide on the best branching strategy for a web application project. Here is what I have come up with until now and I would greatly appreciate any comments an

Answer 1

I tend to use Git for my projects, but the process I tend to follow goes like this (and should work for Subversion as well):

• for each new feature, create a branch for that feature.
• When everything works, merge it into the staging branch, and deploy it to the staging server (you do have one of those, right?)
• Once we're sure the client is happy with what's on staging, we merge the staging branch into the production branch, tag it as something like production_release_22 or production_release_new_feature_x, and then deploy that tag to the production server.

Tags are never, ever updated - once something gets deployed, it stays that way until more changes are built, tested, and tagged - and then the new tag is deployed. By making sure that it's tags getting deployed and not branches, I keep myself (or others) from doing things like "I'll just commit this one quick change and update the server without testing it".

It's worked pretty well for me so far.