How do you handle back-merges?

In my organisation, we follow a dev -> qa -> master pipeline.

Developers can keep raising PRs to dev. Based on QA team availability, a particular commit is called the code_freeze commit, and QA will checkout from dev and merge to qa .

Problem arises when during explorative testing, some logical issue is found which passed the unit and integration tests. Now the developer has to checkout from qa and provide a fix as dev may contain commits not in QA testing cycle.

After successful testing, the QA team merges the fixed qa branch back to dev.

Is there a better solution to this?

I would do as follows:

wait till I can merge the DEV into the QA,
delete the DEV
create a new DEV from the QA
let all feature-branches be rebased onto the new DEV.

you can ofc cross merge but I try to stick to

"merge down, rebase up"
never rebase a public branch

Sidhant Panda abort them and after the rebase create a new one. but I'm not even sure if that's necessary because if I remember correct, git identifies branches by "name" so, probably you don't have to do anything besides force-push the branches after the rebase.

j Would it not be easier to merge QA into DEV test it oneself then merge into QA? Just so, if the QA team are busy one is not sat waiting on someone.

well ofc a small crossmerge is possibility, my approach is more about the clean history graph.

actually the suggested cherrypick seams to be the easiest solution since the graphs should remain the same. it boils down to taste on small changes and there are still a lot of arguments of merge vs rebas

Whoever sends the fix, should just cherry-pick that particular commit in all the branches (Dev, QA and Master, or I am guessing QA will get merged to master, so that's taken care of), that way no one gets blocked, no? No one needs to stop development in the dev branch.

I agree with j!

a particular commit is called the code_freeze commit, and QA will checkout from dev and merge to qa

Since it's called a code-freeze commit, development on that particular branch should stop. A new branch should ideally be checked out if you're going to continue work. 😄

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