Gitflow Considered Harmful

A quick reference guide to help teams move away from Gitflow

I’ve noticed a lot of dev teams still use GitFlow and i’ve found myself repeating the same arguments against it enough times, that I finally sat down and put together a consolidated guide. I think the easiest way to cover the topic is with a history timeline.

Sharing the timeline below should serve as a good primer before a team sits down to discuss the pros/cons and make up their own mind.


2010: GitFlow was initially proposed

It quickly became the standard that every engineering team followed

2015: The “GitFlow Considered Harmful” blog post was published

It triggered a bit of a dust-up among devs online, resulting in the author writing a 2nd post

Since then it seems that most dev teams have abandoned GitFlow

Many still hold to it and in some places it’s still referenced as the standard

2017: The “considered harmful” author proposes “OneFlow

Some time later Github and Gitlab basically copied this idea

Over the years several articles bashing GitFlow also popup (one example here)

2020: Author of GitFlow updates his article to discourage GitFlow

There are still cases where it’s useful, but not for most modern dev teams.

2021: “Considered Harmful” author writes “OneFlow on GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab


Edward Romano Written by:

I dabble in, and occasionally obsess over, technology and problems that bug me