Question

Should multiple developers work within the same branch, and update – modify – commit ? Or should each developer have his/her own each branch exclusively? And how would sharing branches impact an environment where you are doing routine maintenance as opposed to unmaintained code streams? Also, how would this work if you deploy each developers work as soon as it is done and passes testing (rapidly, as opposed to putting all of their work into a single release).

Answer 1

In general, I have found that having developers (who are working on the same project) use the same branch is better for finding integration problems sooner. If developers are each using an individual branch, then you’re just delaying possible integration problems until later, when you merge the branches.

Of course, having developers work on the same branch means you need to have actual communication between those developers, but that’s a social problem and not a technical one.

Developers would work on separate branches when there is a good reason for that branch to exist in the first place (such as a patch release of a previous version of the software, or a special build for a specific customer).

Note that tools such as Git and Mercurial allow developers to easily create their own private branches to organise their own work. This is a different situation from more than one developer sharing a branch, and (usually short-lived) private branches should be encouraged.