Branching & Merging in large Projects

Question

Hi,

I just thinking about a hole TFS Guidiance for my "big" projects. Its not a real example, but I think it's near reality.

Following szenario. I am a big consulting company. I have several customers and several projects with totally different sizes. One of my project for one customer is a big project with multiple features. The teams are located in different countries. I'll think this explaination about the szenario is not too big ;-)

So here is what I am thinking about. We have one TFS Server or a Server Farm at the main office. At the other office's we have a proxy to ensure the performance at each location. For the big project at the customer side I would create a Team Project Collection. The Team Project Collection should contain multiple Team Projects, for each Feature one.

So we have a structure like this:

My Team Project Collection
- Core Team Project
- Feature TP One
- Feature TP Two
- Feature TP Three
- ....

Until this point I am clear of understanding and I have no issues. But now my next topic leads me to Braching & Merging. All Feature Projects are implementing the Core Team Project. Each Project should have Dev, Main and Release Branch. So my question is how would you handle it? How would realize it? Would you define a Master Project where all project's were merged together? What are your experiance handling such large projects?

I never thought about this, but now I am very interested in. Maybe someone would like to share his experiance with me so that I can maybe realize something more :-)

Best Regards,

Jan

Answer 1

Hi Jan, 

Thanks for your post. 

For how to design the Branch structure in Project development, please refer to TFS Branching Guide: http://tfsbranchingguideiii.codeplex.com/, there are several basic Branching structure type in the Guide.    

---

John Qiao [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us