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The Holocron

Branching Strategy

There are a lot of various opinions on branching strategies and while all of them are great and have their place, they all tend to add a lot of overhead and maintenance with little value to the workflow. We prefer to use the simplified strategy known as Github flow.

When working with any of our libraries, there’s no need to prefix it with feature/ or hotfix/ or anything like that; Github’s PR-style workflow allows for quick and disposable branches. Create branches off main and use descriptive names such as create-donut-chart, refactor-dropdown so that users can see what’s being worked on.

Naming

Branch names should short, concise and understandable for the work that is being done. While not a necessity, setting up <tab> completion for git branches can speed up the discovery of branch names. The following tips are designed to speed up your workflow with the addition of tab completion.

  • Use only lower case letters. Lowercasing makes it quicker to type by providing fewer letters to get working. Avoid upper case letters as it requires a higher level of dexterity that can decrease the speed of workflow
  • Use dashes instead of underscores. The same is true as above, they’re are easier to type and require less dexterity.
  • Don’t prefix the branch name with any particular pattern. Unless you regularly clean up your local branches, it’s likely to increase the number of characters and tabbing through in order to complete the branch name you seek
  • Don’t include the ticket number. Adding it falls into the same faults as suggestion 2 above; it requires a lot more typing in order to tab complete through to the branch you may want

When searching through a bunch of branches, issue-123 doesn’t provide any inherent value to the developer in hopes to find the feature they want to help out on; however seeing modal-trigger-open gives the developer some insight into what work is being done.

Examples

An example of some well named branches:

Terminal window
// good
git checkout -b fix-bug-x
git checkout -b new-component


// bad
git checkout -b JIRA_1234
git checkout -b tests