The first law of branching is: don’t. There is no other law.
The only sane way to develop software in a group, whether collocated or distributed, is to have a single branch (“trunk”) to which everyone commits changes, with constant running of the regression test suite to make sure that any breaking change is detected and corrected right away.
To allow branching, that is to say the emergence of separate lines of development with the expectation that they will be merged back later on, is to guarantee disaster. It is easy to diverge, but hard to converge; not only hard, but unpredictable. It can take days, weeks or more to reconcile changes and resolve conflicts, when the reason for the changes is no longer fresh in the developers’ memories, and the developers themselves may even no longer be there. Conflicts should be detected right away, and corrected immediately.
The EiffelStudio development never uses branches. A related development, EVE (Eiffel Verification Environment), maintained at ETH, includes all research tools, and is reconciled every Friday with the EiffelStudio trunk, so it is never allowed to diverge into a separate branch. Most other successful teams I know apply the first law of branching too. Solve conflicts before they have had the time to become conflicts.
