The Branch-When-Needed extended branching system

There are many branching systems to follow out there, some of which can be found within the SVN Best Practices article from Apache. The following is a slight modification to such article's Branch-When-Needed system.

I came up with this after trying several other systems and finding ourselves with a broken trunk or with the merging hell. Once we implemented this system those things went away and today my team is still using it to manage our projects' source on SVN.

Rules

Users commit their day-to-day work on /branches/development abiding to the following rules:

1. Work committed to /branches/development can be occasionally broken so that users can sabe their work even when it's not yet complete without worrying about loosing their local work
2. A single commit (change set) must not be so large so as to discourage peer-review and should include a commit message with a clear description of the changes performed
3. If the change set(s) required to complete a particular feature or fix are too big and could potentially break development, disrupting other users' day to day work, then a branch should be created and small/reviewable change sets should be committed to such branch, which must also be kept in sync with /branches/development so that merging the branch when the feature/fix is complete causes the least possible pain
4. Once work in development is stable and passes the tests, /branches/development should be merged into /trunk
5. /trunk must compile and pass tests at all times. Committers who violate this rule must fix trunk at their earliest and backport their changes to /branches/development once the problem is fixed
6. Tagging /trunk in a per-release basis is mandatory

Pros

• /trunk is guaranteed to be stable at all times
• User's daily workflow is kept seamless within /branches/development

Cons

• Merging from /branches/development to /trunk may become a hassle under rare circumstances but it's worth the peace of mind that committing everything at the end of the day and going home brings