I worked for a company that’s doing something in similar fashion, without naming it, for around 5 years. A team of 6 developers , not fast paced at all. And even for us, this way of managing code and releases was a nightmare and a huge failure.

You had to wait for something to be tested and deployed , FIFO ! If something urgent comes up, you need to find ugly tricks to hide the unfinished structure or functionality first, and then start building that other urgent thing. And guess what ? There comes another hiper-urgent thing before you’re done with this urgent thing, and you need to implement another layer of hidden code.

And while you’re doing all this, some bug shows up on live system and you need to code and deploy it ! So what do we do ? We are so clever, so this time we don’t hide anything but just code the fix on the last deployed code base and deploy that , without a commit ! Later we still do that triple layer hiding and inject the fix , as neat and gentle as a Swiss clockmaker..

Inception, anyone ?