Your branch and 'origin/test-A' have diverged, and have 5 and 21 different commits each, respectively

I am currently on branch Test-A. On doing git status on the terminal, I get the following message:

On branch Test-A <br>
Your branch and 'origin/Test-A' have diverged,
and have 5 and 21 different commits each, respectively.
(use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours)

I created a Merge Request from Test-A to Test-B branch. After the changes got merged. I started getting that message.

Problem Statement: I am wondering how I can fix this

Your git repository has 2 kinds of branches. Your local branches that only exist in your repository and remote branches which can be viewed by everyone (these are identified origin/). These usually have the same name for ease of use but don't need to

A local branch can be set to track a remote branch. This allows you run git push and git pull to send and receive updates with origin.

The message that you are seeing is the local branch and the remote branch that it is tracking each of commits that the other does not have. A common way that this would happen is you are doing work on your branch and make some commits. Meanwhile, someone else pushes new commits to the remote branch. In the course of your work, you run git fetch or if on another branch git pull, git will update the status of the last commit that the remote branch is at and find that it has commits that your local version does not have.

As the message says, running git pull will update this (it can cause a merge commit to happen, I prefer git pull --rebase to avoid this).

> I am wondering how I can fix this

TL;DR this situation is resolved either with a merge or a rebase (and I share Schleis' view that rebase is the clearly better choice).

However to address some of the underlying question and to expand on Schleis' answer I'll add a bit more.

First you should start using gitk --all¹ as your every-day version history visualization tool from today and the rest of your life.

Yes, the ui might not look modern but since starting with git in 2005 I have yet not found any alternative that is remotely close to be able to replace it.

So to give an example screenshot from a test repo that approximately describes your current situation (I did not bother to create all 21 commits in difference, only 13).

Together with the information about the difference between remote and local branches, see how this screenshot super clearly explains the situation that you have some local changes that is ahead of the last common shared history with the remote branch, and likewise that the remote Test-A branch has some newer commits that your branch has not incorporated yet?

I am not going into details on merge/rebase just show how the respective results would look like:

Even without no prior knowledge just looking at gitk output pretty much explains the difference immediately.

Everyone using git really ought to look at gitk every single day.

¹
Actually you want gitk "--exclude=refs/notes/*" --all & to exclude cached test results from git-test, because you always use it to test and verify all your commits on a branch, right? Right? If not you really, really, really, really should!