Branching and Merging Resources

A list of resources to information about Branching and Merging for Parallel Development

-- initiated 23 Feb 2004, BradAppleton?

Attempting to list these in chronological order ...

• Streamed Lines: Branching Patterns for Parallel Software Development, Brad Appleton et.al.; 1998
• Advanced SCM Branching Strategies, Steven Vance; 1998
• High-level Best Practices in Software Configuration Management, Laura Wingerd, Chris Seiwald; 1998
• ClearCase Branching and Labeling Best Practices for Parallel Development, Brad Appleton; 2000 Rational User's Conference (RUC2000), Philadelphia, PA, August 2000
• Branching-related papers from 2001 Perforce User Conference (P4UG2001?)
  • Graphing Your Codelines: Two Techniques, Sandy Currier
  • Cooperative Development at Symbian, Peter Jackson
  • Can We Ship Yet?, Gareth Rees
• Software Configuration Management Patterns: Practical Teamwork, Effective Integration,
  by Stephen P. Berczuk & Brad Appleton; 2002 (has several branching "patterns")
• Advanced Branching Techniques for SpectrumSCM, William C. Brown; 2002
• The Importance of Branching Models in SCM, Chuck Walrad and Darrel Strom, 2002
  • Follow-up letter: SCM Branching Strategies
• CM Branching Strategy, from "Snuffy Bear" at UCM Central; 2002
• Version Control with Subversion: Branching and Merging, chapter 4 of the original Subversion book from O'Reilly; by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick & C. Michael Pilato; O'Reilly & Associates, 2002
• Selecting The Right Branching Solution: Techniques, Strategies And Trade-offs, Brad Appleton; 2003 Rational User's Conference (RUC2003), Orlando, FL, August 2003
• "Merge Mania", the November 2003 issue of CM Crossroads
  • ABCs of a Branching and Merging Strategy, Mario Moreira
  • Merging Defect Fixes into the Development Codeline, Michael Sayko
  • Codeline Merging and Locking, Brad Appleton et.al.
  • Dealing with the Aversion to Mergin, Matthew K. Johnson
  • Merge mania, Bob Aiello
• Branching-related papers from 2003 Perforce User Conference (P4UG2003?)
  • Merge as You Go, Christopher Berarducci
  • Codeline Management for Evolutionary Development", Anders Johnson
  • Changing How You Change, Richard Brooksby and Peter Jackson
• Container-based SCM and Inter-file Branching, by Laura Wingerd (also see the corresponding paper), 3rd BCS CMSG Conference, June 2003
• Avoid Trivial Merges -- CMWiki page by Marc Girod, 2005
• The Flow of Change (presentation) and How Software Evolves, Chapter 7 from Practical Perforce: Channeling the Flow of Change in Software Development Collaboration; by Laura Wingerd; O'Reilly & Associates, 2005.
• SourroundSCM Branching Strategies
• Branching and Merging with MS Team Foundation Source Control, includes a nice Branching & Merging primer; August 2006
• MS Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance, the MS TFS Community Branching Guidance project & site, 2007
• Branch: Yes! Merge: No! — Marc Girod, 2007