We have been discussing the advantages of a 'relay race' style of development. This approach has in-house and remote developers completing granular requirements and tasks each day, and their counterpart picking up progress as their work day begins.

Success with this approach requires articulating a good strategy for branching in the code repository. There are two main strategies:

Long-lived feature branches - A feature branch is created when work commences on a significant feature. Team members working on that feature contribute their changes to the feature branch only. When the feature is complete, it goes through a process of testing and, when approved, the feature branch is merged to the master branch. Sometimes, the merge process is challenging since conflicting changes may have been introduced over time from multiple feature branches. To reduce this risk, many teams will merge changes from master regularly so that any merge issues are resolved in advance.

Short-lived feature branches - With this strategy, a feature branch is created when work on some small segment of work is initiated. When each chunk of work is completed, it is merged to master - this may happen multiple times a day. Merging from master regularly is still a good way to avoid merge surprises.

(Some may observe that there is a third way: commit directly to master. We view that short-lived feature branches serve essentially the same purpose. Having a feature branch, however, gives a nice way to collect a coherent set of changes to be reviewed. More on that later...)

At Amplified Development, we strongly recommend short-lived feature branches. Applying changes to the master branch is an essential part of a continuous integration strategy. And, it promotes the sort of team integration that Extreme Remote teams need.

Applying changes to the master branch before a feature is complete, however, raises some challenges. You don't want incomplete, unreviewed features appearing in a staging/test environment, much less production. There are two key strategies to address the challenge: feature toggles and daily code reviews. Let's discuss those next...