More on Branch Promotion

One important and non-obvious trick of the trade when implementing a branch promotion model is to only promote to your production branch after committing to the deploy or release of the product. Ideally, you promote once you know you will not be rolling back, which could be as late as a week or two after the actual release!

Doing this ensures that while you are certifying your release candidate, you can still perform emergency production patches and not lose them.

In order to do this, it is important to ensure your builds do not depend somehow on the intended deploy target, because you would want to be able to deploy any build no matter where it was made. Doing this ensures that your build artifacts are properly reusable, and no unneeded rebuilds take place.