Branches
We are using the branching strategy by NVIE.
Feature development and bug fixes are committed into their own feature branch.
When a release is ready, all feature branches are merged into develop. A release branch is created from develop. Any fixes based on testing of this branch get committed into the release branch. Development can continue on new feature branches and in the develop branch, but the release branch should be bug fixes only for that release.
When the release branch is ready for deployment, it is merged into the master branch.
The master branch is tagged with the release version.
The master branch is merged into develop.
If a serious production issue is found we create a new hotfix branch from master. The fix is done in the hotfix branch and then merged into master and tagged with a release version.