I’m not saying that you should never use feature branches. If they are sufficiently short, their problems are much reduced. (Indeed, users of CI usually also use branches, but integrate them with mainline each day.) Feature branches may be the right technique for open source projects where you have infrequent commits from programmers who you don’t know well (and thus don’t trust). But in a full-time development team, the cost that feature branches impose on refactoring is excessive. Even if you don’t go to full CI, I certainly urge you to integrate as frequently as possible.
