Yep. What you're describing was used at GitHub [1], at least for a while. I've had a lot of success pitching it to small dev shops that have struggled with more

Yep. What you're describing was used at GitHub [1], at least for a while. I've had a lot of success pitching it to small dev shops that have struggled with more complicated branching models, including git flow. I'm pretty sure git flow became popular just because it was the top search result for "how to git". Other criticisms of git flow and alternative branching procedures have come up over the years [2] and been discussed here [3][4][5]. A good, simple metric for whether your team is using git well or not is how often a developer is forced to play Guitar Hero [6] just to fix up a bad merge or rebase. The ideal answer is "never"; if it's happening more than a couple times a year, something's wrong. [1]: https://gist.github.com/jbenet/ee6c9ac48068889b0912 https://gist.github.com/jbenet/ee6c9ac48068889b0912 [2]: https://barro.github.io/2016/02/a-succesful-git-branching-model-considered-harmful/ https://barro.github.io/2016/02/a-succesful-git-branching-mo... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059 [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22485489 [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11190310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11190310 [6]: https://twitter.com/HenryHoffman/status/694184106440200192 https://twitter.com/HenryHoffman/status/694184106440200192