Till recently my development workflow was the following:

1. Get the feature from product owner
2. Make a branch (if feature is more than 1 day)
3. Implement it in a branch
4. Merge changes from main branch to my branch (to reduce conflicts during backward merging)
5. Merge my branch back to main branch

Sometimes there were problems with merging, but in general I liked it.

But recently I see more and more followers of idea to not make branches as it makes more difficult to practice continuous integration, continuous delivery, etc. And it sounds especially funny from people with distributed VCS background who were talking so much about great merging implementations of Git, Mercurial, etc.

So the question is should we use branches nowadays?