I'm sorry if this is obvious, but I would love to understand exactly what you mean by "the only branches are release branches". What I think you mean is that th

I'm sorry if this is obvious, but I would love to understand exactly what you mean by "the only branches are release branches". What I think you mean is that the only branches are release branches and the development branches on each dev's machine. At my startup, we use feature branches, and we expect devs to continually merge master into their branch while it's under development (ideally daily), and to fix any resulting conflicts or test failures. We have them push these branches to the repo (which triggers our continuous integration server), but they're treated as private works in progress. Then, when they finish and pass code review, we're confident that they will merge seamlessly, since they've been merging master all along. (We also use git merge --squash for the final merge to avoid seeing all the intermediate commits on the master commit log.) I'm trying to understand if your practices are meaningfully different. Do developers have private branches on their machines for weeks on end? Are they encouraged to regularly merge master into those private branches?