A quick reference guide to help teams move away from Gitflow
I’ve noticed a lot of dev teams still use GitFlow and i’ve found myself repeating the same arguments against it enough times, that I finally sat down and put together a consolidated guide. I think the easiest way to cover the topic is with a history timeline.
Sharing the timeline below should serve as a good primer before a team sits down to discuss the pros/cons and make up their own mind.
2010: GitFlow was initially proposed
It quickly became the standard that every engineering team followed
2015: The “GitFlow Considered Harmful” blog post was published
It triggered a bit of a dust-up among devs online, resulting in the author writing a 2nd post
Since then it seems that most dev teams have abandoned GitFlow
Many still hold to it and in some places it’s still referenced as the standard
2017: The “considered harmful” author proposes “OneFlow”
Some time later Github and Gitlab basically copied this idea
Over the years several articles bashing GitFlow also popup (one example here)
2020: Author of GitFlow updates his article to discourage GitFlow
There are still cases where it’s useful, but not for most modern dev teams.
