For history noise, just rebase before merging and you won't get a merge commit. It's really easy and preserves the use of branches. Our process is: - create a

For history noise, just rebase before merging and you won't get a merge commit. It's really easy and preserves the use of branches. Our process is: - create a branch for every change - make commits relatively small, but complete; each commit shouldn't break the build our the tests - request peer review when the code is ready to merge - when reviewed, rebase onto team's development branch and merge