finishing-a-development-branch

Finishing a development branch involves choosing between merging locally, creating a pull request, keeping the branch, or discarding it. The optimal path depends on your team's integration workflow and whether you need a peer review before finalizing the merge.

To merge a feature branch locally, first verify your worktree is clean and all local tests pass. This ensures a repeatable integration process by enforcing guardrails before allowing a local merge commit to be created.

You need to create a pull request when your workflow requires peer review or automated integration checks before finalizing a development branch. This path pushes your changes remotely, enabling CI guardrails and team validation prior to the merge.

Yes, you can keep a development branch active after changes are finished. This option preserves the work without merging or discarding, which is useful if you need to pause integration or maintain the branch for future updates.

After merging or discarding changes, post-action cleanup involves validating the integration and removing the finished feature branch. This ensures a reliable handoff and maintains a clean worktree for future development work.

Your feature branch needs to pass local tests to satisfy integration guardrails before any finalization options are presented. This requirement prevents broken code from being merged or pushed, ensuring a reliable and repeatable handoff process.