[whurley23]

I'm in an environment where the work consist of multiple streams. There are long running tasks, major features that can go for months, require multiple rounds of review and approval, and a sustained amp of back-and-forth. Then there are smaller ones that are typically accomplishable within a typical iteration time period. And then you have hot fixes, security or emergency changes.

These all have separate QA, integration, and release timelines that can -- and often do -- change during the process. As a result, what goes into any given release is sometimes being changed almost right up until we hit the button. Having the ability to roll a release branch from different feature branches and not get miscellaneous work from things that aren't ready is important.

Now, this could also be done with clever use of feature flags, but the platform doesn't play nicely with that concept. Plus, then there would be the work of going back and removing them or leaving in place a mess of conditional statements littered around.

Doing it in version control is architecturally simpler, integrates better with our task and version management tools and is easier to standardize on. There is a cost in how to handle merge conflicts, but that is manageable and can be offset by good task planning and careful work. And the occasional reset