No, that's not the point of the branch. The point of a branch is to label concurrent development. There's nothing about a branch that says it must be "test co

No, that's not the point of the branch. The point of a branch is to label concurrent development. There's nothing about a branch that says it must be "test code" or "pre-release" code, but your perspective is common: Everyone wants blue/green or to fully distinguish between "live code" and "test code" because they think the problem isn't theirs to solve: That their manager doesn't give them enough time, or their predecessor didn't like clean code like you do, or that's just what test databases are for. Infrastructure that really supports branching is uncommon because it's difficult and it requires very careful consideration with regards to the entire architecture. Some examples of systems that actually use branching correctly: * Implement random 0.5%, 1%, 5% etc traffic diverted to test branches * Front-end web service selects branch from URL or cookie * Backend service compares 5% live queries against test database and compares results If your system doesn't have something like this, you're really missing out: Really big applications (the kind that span multiple continents) don't have an "atomic operation" to their deploy, and you shouldn't try to pretend that they do. That's how we got IPv6.