How do you do revision control with Integration testing?

I am working on a project where I am doing Integration/Software testing.

Originally we were working on the same branch as development, but the problem is that the development branch is creating new features very quickly. Creating Integration code has become difficult because the branch is unstable. We do have a regression in this branch that checks that the old features are working, but we have found that we need some breathing room so that we can create a some initial test code.

Our thoughts are to create a branch (so a DEV for development and a STAGE for us), so that we have stable code. Once we feel that our test code is stable we can merge DEV to our STAGE and then we see what breaks. If all works well, we can add our test code back to the DEV so that the new features that we tested will not break again.

The problem is in bug fixes.

While we are creating 开发者_开发问答the integration test code, the dev team will be continuing to develop their code on the DEV branch. Odds are we are going to find a bug in their code on the STAGE branch. This can cause one of two senerios.

1. The bug is a valid bug. In which case they can branch off of STAGE where the bug fix is detected, fix the bug and merge it into DEV.

2. The bug has been fixed in DEV somewhere. The problem that I am having is that if this bug is fixed in DEV, then we would have to merge into STAGE all of the changes from the last merge point to when this bug was fixed.

It seems that this is a common issue where a integration team is working with a dev team, and both teams do not know how to solve this problem.

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"The problem that I am having is that if this bug is fixed in DEV, then we would have to merge into STAGE all of the changes from the last merge point to when this bug was fixed."

Why? Any decent source control system should allow you to cherry-pick changes. You may have to do a lot of manual merging depending on the changes made, but it should certainly be possible.

Another possible solution would be to freeze the DEV branch until a fix for STAGE has been submitted to it.