Introduction
In collaborative development, multiple teams often work on different features while production systems may require urgent fixes. Managing these changes across development, testing, and production environments can be tricky — especially when using a branching strategy in Azure DevOps.
In this blog, we’ll walk through a real-world scenario involving three branches — main (development), release (testing), and trunk (production) — and show why cherry-picking is sometimes the best approach over a full merge
Scenario
Considering we maintain separate branches for each environment:
- main → development
- release → testing
- trunk → production
A new requirement (Notebook 3) was developed in a feature branch and merged into main.
At the same time, a critical production issue was found in Notebook 2. To fix this:
- A new branch was created from the main
- The fix was applied and merged back into main
Now, the bug fix needs to be pushed to production.
Option 1: Full Merge
Merging the main → release would bring in:
✅ The bug fix for Notebook 2
❌ The new requirement(Notebook 3) which is not yet tested
This risks introducing untested code into testing and production environments.
Option 2: Cherry Pick (Preferred)
Instead of merging everything from main, we selectively pick only the bug fix commit for Notebook 2 and apply it to the release, and then forward it to trunk.
What is Cherry Pick?
Cherry-picking means picking only the specific change you want from one branch and applying it to another — without bringing all other changes along.
In our case, cherry-picking ensures:
- Only the bug fix for Notebook 2 is moved forward
- The new requirement(Notebook 3) stays in main until it’s tested and ready
Conclusion
Cherry-picking is a powerful tool when you need precision. It allows you to keep environments in sync with only the necessary changes, without risking the stability of your testing or production systems.