I am new to Branching and Merging but I have been tasked with making future development on an application possible while still allowing bug fixes to production. Usually I am the only developer on the application unless I am on leave.
I have watched a Pluralsight video on Branching and done some forum/stack reading. I was hoping someone could take a look at my solution proposal and critique. I am concerned I will cause more problems than solutions if I get this wrong
As of Version 1.1.0.0 I have introduced a branching system for future development. Version 1.1.0.0 is our production branch. No changes should appear here except bug fixes. Version 1.2.0.0 is the next version and our development branch.
After completing a development, the development branch will merge to the Application (trunk). The application will be deployed for testing. After sign off the development branch becomes production, the previous version branch will be removed. A new branch will be created for the next version.
For bug fixing, the bugs are fixed against the production branch and merged to the application so when the development branch merges down it also obtains those fixes.