Before starting development, the solution architect should also decide on the right branching strategy for VSTS, which can be useful in the following scenarios:

• When a stable version is needed for testing while the development work continues in the other areas.
• When multiple development teams are working on a set of features that are independent, but each team also depends on the features developed by the other teams. You need to isolate the risk of the changes made by each team and yet, you will finally need to merge all the features together into one product.
• When the implementation is being carried out in multiple phases, one phase that is in production may need continuous support but the team may be working on the next phase.

The following are some popular branching strategies typically used in the operations projects:

• The main only strategy: This is the simplest and most basic branching methodology where one branch is created and all the developers check in the changes to the main branch. The build machine can be used to create a build out of the main branch to be released for testing and later, for the production environment. The following image shows only the main branching strategy:

• The development and main branching strategy: The development and main branching strategy introduces one or more development branches from the main, which enables the concurrent development of the next release, multiple projects running in parallel, experimentation, or bug fixes in an isolated development branch. The following image shows the Main and Dev branching strategy:

• Development, main and release: If you expect to be performing emergency break fixes outside of your normal release schedule, create a release branch. The release branch represents the code that exists in production. The following image shows the branching strategy with release:

• Development, main and multiple release: If you are ISV, developing vertical solutions and want to manage and support multiple version of your solutions, you can create multiple release branch to service specific product version. The following image shows the multiple-release strategy: