More Good Practices When using Version Control

Last week I wrote about only committing one bug fix to the version control system per checkin and to not batch up the changes for later with one large checkin. You can read about it here. Today I want to talk about working on a branch.

When working on a branch, many people batch up their changes and do one huge merge at some later point in time. I don't like to do this. I like to follow a process that lets my brain work on more challenging things, so my process is simple. I fix one bug, check it into the branch I'm working on (as I stated before), then merge that change into the other branch, test it, then commit it to that branch. By doing it this way I complete each task and don't ever think about it again, I reduce human error when performing the merge, and other code that relies on my changes will be easy to merge since all dependencies have already been merged.