[yen223]

That's how I work as well. Not a huge problem if you're using git, since branches are cheap and merges are easy.

[sidcool]

We use Subversion mostly, I guess that's why the merging is a hassle.

[tghw]

In SVN, "merging" is a bad, scary, no good word. In Git/Mercurial it's an everyday operation that happens so seamlessly 90% of the time that you don't even notice. The other 10% of the time, you have great tools (i.e. 3-way merge tools) that make it easy to reconcile conflicting changes.

[erikpukinskis]

I was confused about all your "we avoid merging" comments, because I can't imagine how you could possibly work without merging, but this explains it.

[karmelapple]

Agreed. Amazing how much the right tool can change habits - for the extremely better. It has barely occurred to me that people might struggle with merges (at least, small feature merges) anymore. Switch to git at a minimum, if possible.