How to Avoid Branching

Problem:

Best practices for Trunk-Based Development

Goal is Continuous Integration

Really we want Faster Feedback

Complications:

In monolithic codebases, it's hard to make quick changes

Team members need to have the skills to make the changes

The mindset gets in the way of people making a change from one monolithic build

I want refactor mercilessly

I want to release rapidly

100s of developers, with a big legacy codebases

Branches allow you to circumvent fixing underlying issues in the organization

Potential Solutions:

A lot of places could do trunk-based development, but there is resistance like "people will break things" all the time. We have to switch first, experience some pain, but usually shorter than usual.

You might be fine with a well-functioning branching workflow. Why change? Is this the biggest problem to solve?

Fix the smallest "ouch" that the team feels at the moment...eventually trunk-based development will come up.

Shorten your branch lifetime. The shorter-lived branches are one step closer to trunk-based development.