Branching

                                                                   | | To branch or not to branch - it's not even a question.

Not branching prevents you taking risks, but branching isn’t free so there’s a tradeoff.

Strategy	What is it?	Advantages	Disadvantages
Branch by abstraction (aka feature flags)	Have configuration turning your branch on and off dynamically at runtime.	No merging
Feature Branches	A branch for a specific story/feature, reintegrated into trunk when it's 'done'.	Team is isolated from the firehose.	More costly than branching by abstraction due to merge overhead.
Merge Only Release Branch	No checkins to release branches are allowed. Everything change on a release branch must be merged in.	No way to regress changes as everything is applied to the trunk branch before it gets into prod,

 

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/