High-level Best Practice Three(3) in Software Configuration Management

There are six general areas of SCM deployment, and some best practices within each of those areas. The first and second areas and there practices are already discussed.

Branching
In Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems, branching allows development to proceed simultaneously along more than one path while maintaining the relationships between the different paths. A branching strategy consists of the guidelines within an environment for the creation and application of codeline policies. There are different tools that support branching Creating a branching strategy consists of :
- identifying the categories of development that can be easily characterized,
- defining the differences and similarities between them,
- defining how they relate to each other, and
- expressing all of this information as codeline policies and branches.

High Level Practices associated with branching workspace are :
- Branch only when necessary.
- Don’t copy when you mean to branch.
- Branch on incompatible policy.
- To minimize the number of changes that need to be propagated from one branch to another, put off creating a branch as long as possible.
- Branch instead of freeze.