Git Expert Needed

I have a project with following evironments: 1) Production 2) UAT 3) SIT 4) Development I have proposed the following Git branch structure for the project: 1) Production- master 2) UAT- uat 3) SIT- sit 4) Development- dev The code promotion will be from development --> sit --> uat --> production hotfix branch will be used for any quick fixes on the master and will be merged back to master after testing in UAT(UAT serves as the preprod and training environment) Now what I am looking for is a git branch strategy which will allow me to do the following: 1) Code promotion from one branch to the other Dev through to Master 2) Ability to do feature builds on the code. Do I have another branch called "feature"? 3) How do I do hotfixes on production. Do I have to get another branch called "hotfixes" in? I have more questions on: 1) How do I do releases? 2) How to use git tagging properly? Much appreciated if the response is through a scenario and with pictorial representation of how the code is promoted, an example below: Code X in development and the build continues for 2 weeks. End of the 2nd week, development team is asked to move the code for testing. So they tag(??) that point in the dev branch and branch out(??) to SIT. The testing progresses for the next week and end of the next week testers return back with the issues. So the last week the development branch has further moved on with Code X + Y. So is it advisable to allow the developers to proceed on the same branch or better branch out from Code X and continue build on different branch? So when they do the fixes on Code X is it better to not merge the Y portion that is also getting developed parallely? So a full scenario based description is what I would highly appreciate.. Another thing I would like to know is on traceability: Do yo we have a visualisation tool on how the entire branches look like and it should have the tags and releases all marked in it.. If there is an issue in production how do we trace back to the commit that has caused that issue. What are the git commands used? We can try to get the concepts cleared and discussed over call and screenshares with a possible demo with a small code snippet and its promotion to different branches and visualisation with a tool that can show the different branches, tags, releases etc...