We have PR only, squash merge and “must have a linked work item” set up on our default branches. It’s not to protect our default branches from our co-workers.

We have PR only, squash merge and “must have a linked work item” set up on our default branches. It’s not to protect our default branches from our co-workers. It’s to protect them from ourselves. I work in a small team in a non-tech enterprise organisation, and each of our smaller code-bases tend to be mainly worked on by one person. Since the things are interconnected as stuff is today, I’ll sometimes add some react bits to our major front-end app that one of my coworkers have written 90% off, and sometimes he will add new controllers or features to one of the back-end services that I have build. In those cases, the strict default branch policies have never been an issue. Most of the time I’ll approve a Pull Request from my co-workers without reviewing anything, exactly because I trust them. What I don’t trust is for myself to not cut-corners and not alter the default branch, or especially, to create a work-item on the DevOps board for what I think is a minor fix. I don’t trust myself to do that, because sometimes, I still turn the default branch rules off when I need to tinker because the red tape is annoying. Which is fine, until it isn’t, and the more times it isn’t the more I come to respect the red tape we’ve installed to protect us from ourselves.