[manyxcxi]

You could use the feature branch environment for multiple team members to work on at the same time- i.e. Some visual review of UI/UX changes as they're being worked on. Or you could have a QA hammering on that specific feature functionality in that specific environment.

I see it as a very nice way to isolate some ongoing development that you may want some special context setup that allows people to focus on what's going on in that branch only- without having to configure your CI/CD by hand every time you want to do it for a special case.

Right now we have snapshot builds from Jenkins built and deployed to the development environment from all commits to the develop branch. All the work going on in feature branches are ignored by CI until they're merged to develop in order to avoid churn. We have definitely had some feature branches that would've been nice to build and deploy regularly, but orchestrating all that by hand was more than we wanted to spend for the 5-8 days that the feature branch was going to be alive.

Also with integration testing, it is nice to screen out any bugs created when your new config params aren't in the environment yet or to test an upgrade of your DB schema and stuff like that.