In VSTS we use git cherry picking as recommended here to port changes back to the master branch. In short, we do exactly as recommended on that page (VSTS GUI does step 1 automatically as part of cherry picking):
- Create a new feature branch off the master branch to port the changes.
- Cherry-pick the changes from the release branch to your new feature branch.
- Merge the feature branch back into the master branch in a second pull request.
With this process, we need to ensure that we haven't missed cherry picking anything back to master. All release branch changes are supposed to be cherry-picked back to master. However, that step has been forgotten on occasion (it's bound to happen with a manual process). So we cover the potential gap by manually comparing release branches to master as part of our development lifecycle.
The pain that we're feeling is that the branch comparison tools in the VSTS web app don't understand that a changeset in one branch has been cherry-picked back to another branch. As a result, it takes a good bit of time to understand whether anything is out of sync.
Is there a way of making the comparison tools understand that a changeset in one branch is the changeset that was cherry-picked to another branch?
Ideally, this process would be done in the same interface, but we're open to other options.