More Branches, More Risk
Every growing Git repository accumulates feature branches, hotfixes, and experiments. The real danger isn't the branch count itself — it's the combination of long-lived branches and merge frequency. The longer a branch sits unmerged, the more its diff from main grows, and the risk of conflicts rises sharply while reviewers struggle to follow the changes.
This tool takes your active branch count, weekly merge rate, and average branch lifetime, and turns them into a single complexity score. Branches that live longer than 14 days get extra weight, since in practice, branches left unmerged for two weeks or more are the usual source of painful conflicts and stalled reviews. Once your score crosses 60, it's worth reviewing your branch policy — stale branch auto-deletion, or adopting trunk-based development.
The most effective way to lower your score is to keep branch lifetimes short: break features into small chunks that merge quickly, and pair that with a CI policy that deletes branches immediately after merge. As your team grows, tracking this score regularly helps you catch complexity creep before it slows everyone down.
FAQ
Yes. Even a small number of branches left unmerged for a long time will raise the score due to the lifetime weighting.
Generally 30 or below is stable. Above 60 means it is time to clean up branches and rethink your merge strategy.
Yes — it keeps branch lifetimes short, which is one of the most effective ways to lower this score.