Excessive Branch Use Causes Technical Debt and Increases Risk of Bugs

Agile practitioners already know that technical debt is that accumulation of unfinished work can cause projects to be late late late.  Building up a lot of technical debt is a problem because the debt needs to be payed before you can ship.  One way that debt can be accumulated is by profligate use of branches.  Avoid that at all costs!

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The Urge to Merge

Concurrent development of software in a team relies on being able to merge the changes from each person successfully.  Experienced developers will already know this, but there are theoretical limits on how effective merging can be.