Git Workflow

Git Workflow: Being one of the best version control systems for your projects, Git is not just about handling projects but also to collaborate and release management. It gives you the ability to recognize the patterns, knowledge to cope with things, and adapt to your project development process effectively.

Here, various methods and patterns found in Git workflows will be discussed. It will help you gather knowledge across various dimensions while joining, creating, and managing a developing team. It will also expose you to understand or highlight the workflow so that you can implement it in your scenario.

As we have already discussed with the introduction of using Git and have provided you with top-notch tutorials and key-points so that you can get started with Git and ace it. This article primarily focuses on the workflow of Git. So let's get started with it.

Collaboration

Collaboration in Git can be expressed in terms of branching and merging workflows. To release management strategy for the projects, Git enables various branching methods that will intertwine commit tress. It will help you to minimize bugs in integration testing.

Let us look at the branching methods used to collaborate in Git one by one.

Integration Branch

Integrating branches while collaborating with the software development teams is performed by deploying a collection of contributions into production in the form of a single entity. It is primarily done while working in a team and not individually. The integrating branching technique help teams to keep up with the good practices in contributing to the projects individually while deploying. To understand how integration branching works, look at the below diagram to get some idea.

Therefore, an integration branch generally consists of individual collaborations to a project and merging them into the master branch. To do this, you put individual branches to testing and then pushing them into the master branch through commits made. Then master branch is then prepared for deployment.

While performing integration branching, you are expected to be aware of the contributions made to the integration branch. It needs to be merged before the next feature release, or else it will be like mixing different features while merging them into the master branch. This will help you to figure out what is ready to be released.

Forking

Forking refers to the activity of empowering the maintainers of repositories to enforce a gateway before pushing them directly to the original repository. It not only helps to push the branch to the origin but it also helps in the collaboration. Also, forking acts as a reference whenever a user wants to work on a particular repository or bookmarks it for the reference. Below is the diagram through which you can understand the workflow of forking.

While forking, do not use multiple private repositories of team members because this can make it difficult for multiple members to contribute respective features on the same branch. If you synchronize these branches it may become prone to error due to a various number of moving parts. This is the reason why in open source projects there are limited team members with the push access origin.

Topic Branch

Topic branches are often owned by an individual contributor but can also be a designated space for a team to develop a feature upon. Other contributors know that this type of branch could have its commit-tree re-written at any moment, and should not try to keep their local branches synchronized with it.

The use of topic branching is to commit-tree designs. Topic branches are usually owned by an individual member of the team who has some space to develop features. The other contributors are aware of the fact that their contributions can be re-written at any point in time and are also aware of the fact that they should not synchronize their local branches with a topic branch. Below is the workflow which gives a clear idea of this concept.

Note: While using topic branches, you should not use them on public repositories. Doing so will lead to the conflict among the synchronized branches with it which has already been re-written.