The purpose of a child branch is to do development without modifying the parent branch. Such development can be to develop a new release version of a program, add a new feature, or fix a bug. Once this purpose has been reached, it is time to merge the changes in the child branch into its parent branch.
The process of merging a child branch back into its parent branch is full of issues that must be resolved before the changes can be successfully merged.
The first of these is merge conflicts. The second is whether the changes are safe to add to the parent branch. To protect the parent branch many Git-based platforms such as GitHub provide the functionality of a pull request also known as a PR.
A pull request is initiated from the GitHub website. First go to the GitHub page for the repository that you are working with. In the menu near the top of the page, look for the Pull request item and click on it. Follow the instructions on the Pull request page.
Another person on the programming team needs to approve the pull request before the actual merger can take place. Depending on the changes being merged, there may be a selected list of people who can approve the pull request. In large development team, these people are usually the project manager and project architect and sometimes other senior people on the project. It is their responsibility to do a code review of the changes. They also can request that the programmer who submitted the pull request to fix or change things. These changes can range from formatting standards to conflicts with other tasks being worked on within the project team.
The following links provide more information on Pull Requests: