Possible to integrate all current Bamboo plan branches?

Question

Is it possible to merge currently available plan branches into a "combination branch" that contains all changes from the current plan branches?

Trying to give you a short introduction why I'd like to do this

We are more or less following the git-flow workflow. But integrating "feature" branches back to develop should only happen after a review of the corresponding pull request in Stash.

But the issue here is that from time to time pull requests are checked too late and we will have a lot of conflicts near sprint end as nobody took care about the pull requests. (Organisational issue I know)

Idea is now to let Bamboo do the integration of "everything open" to get feedback about merge issues as soon as possible. But as we don't want to (cant't) merge to "develop" automatically the build in merging features of Bamboo won't cut it. At least for my current understanding.

I know that it wouldn't solve any issues. But we would have at least an indicator that we run into problems as soon as possible and the developer created the conflict is at least aware if not responsible for solving it.

Is this a scenario Bamboo itself can help in general or is it something we have to solve on (build) script level?

Pawel Skierczynski · Answer

Maybe I don't understand you process. In my opinion immediate testing each feature branch with develop and maybe encouraging people to not leave feature branches alive for long is enough. 
Even more - red test on feature branch is not critical error - it's just indicator for author. He may have "work-in-progress" and knows that it's failing for 2 days and it's probably okay.

Mike Friedrich · Answer

Why dont you just create an "integration" branch for that in git that is used by Bamboo only (fetch and push)?

Then use that in Bamboo as the primary branch, but developers in the git repo still use the "develop" branch for branching and merging their work.

I guess you still have to manually or by script merge from "develop" before starting a build or update that branch in regular intervals.

Would that work?

Or you could still let Bamboo merge to "develop", but dont let it push back to the repo.

DW · Answer

< - it doesn't scale well and it will just always fail

That's what I'd expect as well. So I thought there might be something that could help or mitigate this problem in Bamboo as it already has the plan branches feature. Or maybe a clever idea on how to tackle this.

Just to reflect on my issue. At the end it boils always down to a people/organisation issue I'd say.