... one other thing though. With a bit of practice you can remove the need to develop on feature branches; break things down into really small chunks and get into the habit of making half-done features unobtrusive (e.g. hiding UI elements until they're ready). That way you can push to master often and have confidence it'll always be safe to deploy, which simplifies your tooling and reduces the scope for merge conflicts etc.
I personally find branching a lot better than the method you described. Master is always safe to deploy in my current setup and I don't usually get merge conflicts :-)
