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Branching before release allows development on the Trunk to continue unaffected while also allowing release hardening “stabilizing” changes to be made to the branch release prior to production deployment. A CI/CD Pipeline should include automated tests which give confidence that a given version of software is releasable. Release hardening activities which exceed 24 hours in duration are Committing more than a couple “stabilizing” changes prior to deploying to production is an anti-pattern and an indication that the CI/CD Pipeline does not have adequate test coverage, or that development practices are breaking the CI/CD Pipeline for extended periods of time. The goal is for teams to ensure that the Trunk is releasable at all times.
Initializing the DataStage working copy for a release branch
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