Protect ourselves from ourselves - SVN Branching Policy for small development team.

Question

Our small team (6) development team is comprised of individuals with varying skill levels and product knowledge.

To protect ourselves from ourselves (or lack of experience) what branching policy should we use?

Answer 1

Branch as often as it seems beneficial.

The more you do it, the more you understand it.

The more you understand it, the more benefit you derive, and the fewer problems and errors you cause.

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If you relegate branching to only those extreme cases where it must be done, you are almost guaranteed to do it in such a way to cause headaches. Practice makes this much less likely.

Keep the barrier to branching as low as possible.

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I guess that this can be summed up: practice, practice, practice.

Answer 2

It would probaby be easier in the long run to switch to a source control system that has better branching and merging support. SVN is good at branching, but lacks decent support for merging. I think you should take a look at both Mercurial and Git. With either one of those you probably won't need to worry too much about policing your branches.