Version Control
Traceable Branch Lifecycle
Summary
Each branch has a clear purpose and identifiable starting point, contains a limited set of changes, and does not represent a deployment environment.
Reasoning
Knowing why a branch exists and where it started makes its changes easier to review and trace. Limiting its scope keeps unrelated changes from hiding what needs to be integrated or reverted.
Using branches to represent deployment environments gives each environment a separate code history. Those histories can diverge, making it harder to tell whether each environment contains the intended reviewed changes.