Should you use Github-Flow for app development?

While working in a new project, the team wants to use github-flow instead of any other git workflow system.

What is Github-Flow?

Read the details in this blogpost

• Anything in the master branch is deployable
• To work on something new, create a descriptively named branch off of master (ie:new-oauth2-scopes)
• Commit to that branch locally and regularly push your work to the same named branch on the server
• When you need feedback or help, or you think the branch is ready for merging, open a pull request
• After someone else has reviewed and signed off on the feature, you can merge it into master
• Once it is merged and pushed to ‘master’, you can and should deploy immediately

Key is here: Everything in master is deployable and should be deployed but what does that mean as an app developer?

In todays dev teams, scrum or kanban is daily business. Release cycles of 1 to 3 weeks is normal.

if we now create a new release as soon as we push to the main branch, even several times a day, we would have to push several new releases to the app stores.

From an app customer perspective, this means updating the app several times a day. Normally this is not a problem, as not everyone goes through the new updates in the app stores, but I have the following experience from my time at Doodle:

We had weekly sprints with one release at the end. So one release per week and actually customers complained why the app updated so often. Sometimes there were also bad reviews so I think even one app release per day would be too much. For a website as well as the web-frontend it is not a problem as customers always use the latest website version anyway but for an app not so good.

I think the Github-Flow is good and simple because it makes sense but not every merge to the main branch should be connected with a public release.

Weekly releases at the beginning or in the middle of the week are sufficient in my opinion.

(Header image credits)