An entire sprint without an SVN branch

A typical development flow has been:

• request an SVN task branch (wait for CM to help)
  
• do stuff (1-3 weeks)
  
• run all the regression tests (not on the latest stable)
  
• hope that nobody did anything that conflicted with us
  
• merge to the pending release (and pray we resolve any conflicts correctly)
  

Now we do the following:

• set up a team git repo (able to do this without CM's help)
  
• clone off a repo for each team member
• set up a daily cron job to get the latest stable from the pending release
• set up a daily hudson build to merge that in and push to team if it passes unit tests
• pull from team as we go (fast!)
  
• run all the regression tests (on the latest stable)
  
• use git to merge on top of the pending release and commit back to SVN (with minimal conflict windows)
  

Well, we finally got through a whole sprint without an SVN task branch. Maybe that seems like a small victory, but it saved us a bunch of late-breaking integration risk.