We use TFS for source control of our Flare content, and I am looking at using the "development, main, and release" (https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs ... ategically) branches in the same way as our developers.
We already have de facto main and release branches, but I do have concerns that we are branching content unnecessarily. The branches would be used much the same as with the developers.
Our help is a merged project of several large Flare projects.
Just to clarify my understanding of how each branch would work:
- Dev branch: This would control help content that is experimental or not reviewed by QA. I am considering adding this extra type of branch for projects that are undergoing a lot of change. These changes can make it hard for me to isolate stable content for translation.
- Main branch: This contains content that is stable, reviewed by QA.
- Release branches: A separate branch of the help that we need to update going forward. We need these in a small portion of our help. Related my comment for the Dev branch, I hope that the release branch would be a stable and self-contained chunk of content for translation.
My situation is a bit more complicated by the presence of shared snippets between the Flare projects. I've experimented with Global Project Linking with some promising results but I'm not sure how the versioning would work for these shared snippets.
Most importantly, does anyone know of any reference books or sites that have best practices for branching and source control for software documentation? I've looked but all I've really been able to find a few sites that talk about git and not TFS. Conceptually I understand that they are very similar, but I would really appreciate any additional sources (especially related to TFS) to point to when making the case to make these changes to my boss.
Thanks,
Mark