/dev/spout: Feature Branches are Not Evil. In fact, they Rock.

/dev/spout: Feature Branches are Not Evil. In fact, they Rock.

There have been several notable blogs lately decrying the faults of feature branches. Both Martin Fowler and Jez Humble have blogged on this topic. Their position contravenes both the proven success of massive projects like the linux kernel who have made forking a way of life and the tenents of lean thinking which tell us to do value added tasks (here, merging) just in time. Their argument is that feature branches cause you to accumulate code destined for release in a multiple places and this fragmentation impedes the benefits of continuous integration, makes refactoring harder, and generally inhibits communication via code. These code quality assurance practices should be pushed earlier upstream, but premature integration is not the best way to do this.