If you use branches for application development, you can configure merge criteria on the pipeline to receive feedback about branches, such as whether a branch has been reviewed or meets guardrail compliance scores.

If there are no merge conflicts, and merge criteria is met, the branch is merged; the continuous delivery pipeline is then started either manually or automatically.

The workflow of tasks in a branch-based pipeline is as follows:

1. One or more developers make changes in their respective branches.
2. Merge criteria, which are configured in Deployment Manager, are evaluated when branches are merged.
3. Continuous delivery starts in one of the following ways:
   1. Automatically, after a branch successfully passes the merge criteria. If another continuous delivery workflow is in progress, branches are queued and started after the previous workflow has been completed.
   2. Manually, if you have multiple development teams and want to start pipelines on a certain schedule.
4. During a deployment run, branches are queued for merging and merged after the deployment has been completed.

The following figure describes the workflow in a branch-based environment.

In a distributed, branch-based environment, you can have multiple development systems, and developers author and test the application on remote Pega Platform development systems. They then merge their changes on a development source development, from which they are packaged and moved in the Deployment Manager workflow.

The following figure describes the workflow in a distributed, branch-based environment.