[mirasmithy]

+1 for master always deployable. In teams I've led, I've made it a rule to never commit to master, and sparingly commit to develop.

Features are developed in branches and merged into develop. Once we're happy with things, we tag & merge into master. (Junior dev so my approach may not be the best.)

[sytse]

To prevent confusion I think it is better to merge feature branches into master and not have a development branch. Master should always be deployable but if you're not practising continuous deployment you can merge into the production branch to do so. This is further detailed in GitLab Flow http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/gitlab_flow.html