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In the Gitflow model, the preproduction or staging environment, represented by the ‘release-*’ type branches, serves as an intermediate environment between the development (‘develop’) environment and the production (‘master’) environment, and it plays a crucial role in ensuring that the software is thoroughly tested, validated, and ready for deployment as a stable release, in order to mitigate risks of low quality or error-prone code in the production environment.
As describe in the previous section, the collapsed Gitflow model presents a united development and preproduction environment, often called simply staging, and it is a lot more compact and simple for smaller teams and more basic applications, while mantaining a defined branch structure and a solid workflow.