I’m working on a team where we keep a clone of the development branch (the main place where work is done), used to deploy to a QA environment. The benefits of this branching technique are:

  • clone is isolated from work
  • It’s easy to tell what was deployed to QA– clone is the source of truth

Instead of merging, we just reset clone to match the development branch.

Here’s the technique:

# Update development, however you prefer.
# I like to rebase. 🤘
$ git checkout development
$ git pull --rebase

# Reset clone to match development
$ git checkout clone
$ git reset --hard development
$ git push

Deploy clone to your QA environment, and you’ll have a working copy of development ready for testing.