Branching Policy for SVN

Recently I've been looking into the prospect of switching from our current SCM system of SVN to GIT. Linus gives a pretty convincing argument in this video (Thanks to Michael Cronnelly our Head of Technical Services for hooking me up with this) but for us the business case is not strong enough at the moment. I'll blog about why in detail in the future.

Analyzing the workflows for the two SCMs meant I had a chance to review and document a general policy for versioning, branching and merging. Currently we have a policy but it is passed around like folk-law and evolves during tea game debates. As with most things at Clock, policy is just a guide and the technical leads will still have the final decision on how a project is versioned and branched, but I thought a picture and policy is always nice.

So here is a first draft of an activity diagram to help the team know when to branch, and how to merge projects.