To branch or not to branch that is the question

Abstract

One of the most contentious areas in software development is branching. Proponents of agile development methodologies are often against the concept of branching as a matter of principle, other large software development projects, such as Windows, are heavy users of branches to control the software generated by thousands of its engineers. Microsoft is migrating its development processes to be able to simultaneously produce software as both stand-alone products and as a SAAS (e.g. Windows 8 and Azure), requiring a re-architecture of these processes. To fully understand the impact of any changes to their development processes the product groups addressed the question of whether and how to use branching within its development process. Bases on this assessment this talk attempts to go back to first principles in regard to software development and shows that there are a lot more similarities than differences between agile and non-agile software development methods. The talk will also discuss the pros and cons of branching identifying where it will positively and negatively impact software development.