Trunk Based Development

@jezeniel

What is Trunk Based Development?

It is a source control branching model, similar to Gitflow.

The main difference with Gitflow is we only have a single main branch which is the trunk/master.

What is the problem with Gitflow?

• Complexity of maintaining multiple branches, master, development, release
• Gives engineers false sense of safety. Instead of everybody cares about production builds and releases, only a select few does
• Releasing to production takes longer, especially if development is far from master

Advantage of  Trunk Based Development

• Simple management, we only have 1 main branch
• Enables Continuous Delivery, which enables quick deployment to both staging and production
• All engineers are responsible in maintaining and making sure the build doesn't break
• Forces as to do good habits like unit-tests and code reviews

Workflow changes

• The trunk/master branch should always be production ready
• Strict implementation of unit-tests and code reviews
• Short-lived branches for features
• Feature flags
• Take advantage of our CI (gitlab runners)
• Full commitment of the team to always ensure the build doesn't fail and doesn't push breaking code to master