▶ Watch this video on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Ask a team what their branching strategy is and you'll get a confident answer: "We use GitFlow." Ask why, and the room goes quiet. Somebody read a blog post a few years back, set it up, and now it's just how things are done.

That's the symptom. The usual explanation is that the team is "following best practices." And that sounds responsible, so nobody questions it.

Here's the actual problem. Those named strategies — GitFlow, GitHub Flow, trunk-based — were each designed for a specific situation. A specific release cadence, a specific kind of product. Copying the diagram without copying the context is cargo-culting. You get the ceremony without the reason.

So there's really only one question worth asking: does this thing help you ship done, working software? If your branches are enabling delivery, great. If they're a twenty-page wiki page last updated two years ago, they're getting in the way.

Branching is a tool for shipping, not a badge of sophistication. The video walks through a simple test to find out which one yours is. Go give it a watch — then go ship something.