Trunk-Based Development
Short-lived branches, and unmerged work as inventory.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A team wants to move from long-lived branches to trunk-based development. What must be in place first?
2 min answer -
intermediate
What has to be true before a team can safely move to trunk-based development?
2 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
A repository takes 420 merge attempts a day. The merge queue validates one change at a time against the current tip and the suite takes 22 minutes. Developers now wait hours to land anything. Which change raises landed merges per day the most?
2 min answer -
advanced
A trading platform's team wants trunk-based development, but a bad deploy has financial consequences. Are the two compatible?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Branch Lifetime
How long a branch lives before being merged, which determines integration pain and is the practical measure of whether integration is continuous.
practiceTrunk-Based Development in Practice
Everyone integrates to one shared branch at least daily, with incomplete work hidden behind flags rather than isolated in branches.
Neighbouring topics
Software Architecture
General material on the engineering underneath an architecture.
SOLID
Five design principles, two of which scale beyond the class.
Domain-Driven Design
Ubiquitous language, bounded contexts and context mapping.
Bounded Contexts
Where one model ends and another begins, and why forcing one fails.
Clean Architecture
Concentric layers with dependencies pointing only inwards.
Hexagonal Architecture
Ports defined by the domain, adapters supplied by infrastructure.
Microservices
Independent deployability, and the distributed problems it buys.
Modular Monolith
Enforced internal boundaries without a network between them.
Service Boundaries
Drawing lines along change patterns rather than technical layers.
Design Patterns
Reusable solutions at code level, and when they become ceremony.
Refactoring
Changing structure without changing behaviour, in verified steps.
Technical Debt
Deliberate, tracked and repaid — as distinct from mess.
Testing Strategies
The pyramid, and the contract tests distributed systems add to it.
Contract Tests
Capturing what consumers actually use, not what the API documents.
CI/CD
Continuous integration and delivery, and the architecture that caps them.
Release Strategies
Blue-green, canary, shadow and progressive delivery.
Feature Flags
Decoupling deploy from release, with an expiry date.
Code Review
Where architectural rules are enforced by people rather than by tools.
DORA Metrics
Throughput and stability moving together rather than trading off.