[hckr1292]

We've adopted some aspects of this flow, and our take is that we test feature branches on stage thoroughly including CI test run and code review.

Then we merge to master and let all the CI run again while we manually verify. Any troubles and you revert. All green? Deploy right away. We try never to deploy more than 2-3 changes to production at a time.

The main bottleneck for us is the speed of our CI runs. It's tempting to merge in a lot of changes to master and let them accumulate on QA. Reducing the test run time is an ongoing goal and should make this system pretty scalable for our team.

Usually, you won't have merge conflicts if you deploy early and often and keep feature branches deliberately small. For larger stories, consider breaking it into discrete feature branches that implement part of the functionality (ex: behind a feature gate).