What’s a Branch?

My Project Manager asked me to outline a Development Procedure to implement to address the chaos of the lack of change control. 

As such, one of the many steps was to enforce a version control system and code reviews.  Not much excuse imho to not have at least a rudimentary familiarity with these concepts, but nonetheless I distributed the document, and for good measure took the time to present a Lunch & Learn meeting on the topic.

My reward? About a week later, I was ambushed with the question from our exasperated ‘Senior’ developer: “What’s a branch!?!?”