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Group Leads and Task leads coordinate and schedule development relevant to their group. They should have developers assigned to work on features in the order necessary to meet ACME's deliverables in the Roadmaps. Group leads should make sure developers are finishing their work and getting it merged to the ACME "master" branch.
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The Coupled Model Group established the timeline for major new features (especially from two or more groups) that are needed for the model, relevant testing criteria, and when the master should be tagged (using the Branch, Tag, and Version name conventions) all timed to meet ACME deliverables as defined in the Roadmaps. Integrators should be aware of the overall schedule Roadmap for their component.
A branch for every feature: Group and task leads and developers should define units of code development that are big enough to be relevant to others, but simple enough that it can be called one feature (or perhaps a couple of highly-interdependent features) and make a branch for each unit of work. These branches are called "feature branches" in our documentation. The developer should make commits that are minimal atomic units of work to complete the feature that the branch seeks to implement. This separation makes it easier to review and debug later. New development should always generally start as a branch from "master". Avoid creating "large" branches that contain many features and touch dozens of files. If a large branch is needed for some major development, the SE hub should be involved in planning.
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