Brent Sordyl's blog

Feature Toggling is not just a different way to achieve feature branching. It is an architectural choice that, sure, helps with maintaining mainline development but the power is that it hands back control of what features should be enabled and when to the business. And it is there, ready for you to harness. No extra steps required. As awesome as Git is[6], you just cannot compete with something that allows you to not only control what features go into a release but what features are live at any one time[7].

(Full Story: Experience Report: Feature Toggling)

See how I haven’t even mentioned feature toggles yet? Feature toggles don’t even come into play unless you have a complete, user-visible feature that you don’t want to appear in your next release. In this situation, the feature-branch alternative is to keep your feature branch unmerged until after your release. Unless you’re doing continuous deployment, or working on a small and experienced team, this is a painful and risky proposition.

(Full Story: On DVCS, continuous integration, and feature branches)