It all depends on the situation. The simplest possible situation of mostly just having a master branch also can work quite well. When you have specialized testers that test a candidate release you start to need release branches. Feature branches start being necessary if changes are temoprarily incompatible with current master. This should not be too common, though. In many cases one can avoid feature branches by having feature switches that get removed as soon as a feature is done. If one wants to or needs to use feature branches they should be short-lived because one will be creating a merge hell if this is not the case. The git flow seems just too complicated for most cases. One comment already notices that it is quite unclear why a separate development and master branch are necessary.