Beetle Platform Multi‑Branch Management Experience for App Development

Internet product teams need rapid iteration, but manual branch management caused difficulties such as linking branches to requirements, coordinating merges during testing, and tracking branch divergence.

To solve these issues, the Beetle platform integrated with the LuBan system to manage the entire workflow from requirement‑branch creation, compilation, testing, to gray release.

Development Branch Model : A release branch is created from master , then multiple feature branches are derived from the release branch for parallel development. After a release branch is packaged and deployed, a hotfix branch can be created for bug fixes, and RD&QA decide whether to merge hotfix changes back to master to avoid conflicts.

The overall process is illustrated in the diagrams (see images).

New Problems and Solutions : For the app project, additional challenges include creating version and feature sub‑branches, notifying master changes, merging master, detecting branch lag, reminding when a sub‑branch leads the version branch, intercepting unsynchronized version branches, and managing hot‑fix branches.

Key questions addressed are:

When and how to create version and feature sub‑branches, with a unified naming convention (e.g., zzbeetle‑feature‑1444‑90 ).

How to detect changes in master and sub‑branches, with page prompts and WeChat notifications for RD&QA.

Hot‑fix management strategy: create a hot‑fix branch from the buggy version, fix, and let RD&QA decide on merging to master to avoid conflicts.

Future Plans : Integrate the public component library into Beetle to automatically track interface changes, further reducing manual effort and enhancing automation and development efficiency.

For more details, refer to the linked articles on Beetle’s hundred‑day journey and related case studies.