This is how my company currently operates. It works well for us, BUT we do have some tools/methods to help us along the way. One of which is staging and product

This is how my company currently operates. It works well for us, BUT we do have some tools/methods to help us along the way. One of which is staging and production trees. We are using perforce, so cross folder integrations are very simple with branch specs. We'll have one folder named 'staging' where all development happens. Yes, the label isn't quite right. We can deploy this code to a 'staging' environment and test. When we're happy, we can integrate into the production branch and deploy. These integrations are always one way; they go from staging -> production only. There are no conflicts to deal with. We also get the benefit of cherry picking updates to push in an emergency.