Is it okay to merge individual files from one bran

Question

I have a three branch setup in TFS, DEV, PRE, and PROD. My team wants to merge individual files from DEV to PRE, so the code can enter test as they complete it. However, I've heard this is not a good idea, and that if we need to do that, we need to be using a feature branch setup. Does anyone have any recommendations on if we should or shouldn't be doing the merging at that fine level (and then when ready to move to production, we'd migrate the entire branch).

Answer 1

You would typically want to merge changesets, not files. If somebody checked in a change that affected 3 files, merging just one of those files probably will break something.