Selecting a branching and merging strategy

Source control allows you to keep a history of all of the changes you have made to your files but also allows working separately from your team members for a while if you so desire. We call this branching. When you are branching in source control, you fork the line of changes currently registered. We call such a fork a branch. A branch allows you to temporarily isolate some work from the rest. If you at any point want to integrate the changes from a branch with the changes on the other fork, you can merge these changes back. Branches are often used for working on not yet complete features, proofs of concept, or hotfixes. Using branches allows you to later decide which changes to include in the next version and which not to.