Branch per feature

Last Friday I have read an article from Mr. Martin Fowler about VCS, focusing in Distributed Version Control System. Although it is an interesting topic, I guess it is a kind of technical discussion if it should distribute or not.
Before someone wants to shoot me, I know that there are advantages over a central system, but the point is that I don't want to highlight it here.

Actually it is much more interesting all the patterns that emerged with this kind of VCS, not because they didn't existed, just because the DVCS makes then simple. So ladies and gentlemen I would like to introduce you the amazing Spider-man!!! Ops… wrong introduction… I would like to introduce you the Feature Branch technique (a.k.a Branch-Per-Feature).

The main idea of this technique is: every new Feature of your software becomes a branch in the version control system, and as soon as this feature is implemented the branch is merged to the baseline. Simple isn't it? There are quite few advantages in this technique, the main one (in my point of view) is that you can release the software with the desired features as soon as they are available.
For example, if you have 3 features on the go, but one of them is important and should be released right now then, just merge it to the baseline and you are ready; the other features are no impacted and your delivery do not need to wait for that.

I don't need to say that to have it working like a charm, continuous integration is a must.

There are two really good articles about it, the first is an introduction about it by Martin Fowler and the second is a How-To about implementing this kind of technique.

• Feature Branch
  
• Branch-Per-Feature Source Control
  

I really got enthusiastic about this kind of source control technique, it is really usefull if you are interested in selling services and not software, so for you last minute services are almost a must.

Have a nice week.