>Nope. Distributed VCS tools have made it easier to merge, but they haven't changed the need for good branching/merging practices. The two biggest mistakes people make with branching is 1) branch too often and 2) keep the branch active for too long without merging. DVCS doesn't change either of those.
>
>Continuous Integration is far newer than version control. With branching, you can't continuously integrate. This is something I have a little bit of expertise with. See http://www.manning.com/kawalerowicz/
>

Branching practices are not the same for everybody, as you can see by TCH comments. What works for me may be don't work for you or somebody else, in this case, what you recommend as good branching practices does not apply to my needs or my work site needs, because we need to do a lot of projects in parallel, even on same core apps, and we don't want the blocking states of past practices, as we accustomed with CVS and SourceSafe.

What we are doing now, up to some point, is "Task Driven Development" and "Branch per Task", on whick this is an interesting reading:

Task Driven Development:
http://www.plasticscm.com/infocenter/quick-start.aspx

Branck per Task:
http://www.plasticscm.com/infocenter/technical-articles/kb-branch-per-task-workflow.aspx

I must say that, being used SourceSafe for more that 17 years, it's a change of mind working this way, and I don't want to go back, because I'm very productive working this way, and I can see that my team too.

I strongly recommend to test this kind of working, and see by yourself if it can work for you or not. It is not a fashion, it's a work style used more and more every time.


Best Regards.-