What Is Trunk Based Development?

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Author: Lorena
Published: 19 Nov 2021

Feature flags and features in the QCD trunk

Sometimes one can be used in lieu of the other, as they both adhere to the same idea of continuously integrating to the trunk. You need trunk-based development to implement continuous integration. Features can be deployed as soon as they are ready and rolled back easily if they are combined with feature flags.

Feature Flags: A Tool for Rolling Out New Features

Individual software developers or teams of engineers don't merge their new branch until a feature is complete, sometimes working for weeks or months at a time on a separate copy. The trunk-based development method helps to avoid lengthy bug fixes and "merge hell" by releasing new features and small changes quickly. It is a popular practice among the teams that work in the Agile style to have feature flags or feature toggles in place to ensure that any new features can be rolled back quickly and easily if any bugs are found.

Merging Requests

Requests are often merged because developers don't like them. The benefits of trunk-based development are diminished because it is hard to reason about the impact of large changes on a system through inspection.

Gitflow: A Tool for Managing Features in Software Development

The base code is the trunk in software development. The source code is known as branches. Software designers make small code changes to a single branch in the version control system in a trunk-based development model.

The baseline branch is also called the trunk. Software trunking is not a synonym for networking trunking. The infrastructure of a physical line or link can carry many signals simultaneously for network access between two points.

A development team can avoid long code integration tasks by using trunking. Changes are pushed directly to the trunk. Errors are addressed before they go live.

Project teams run unit tests to identify and resolve code conflicts. Pair programming teams review each line of work before moving to the trunk. Gitflow is a tool that manages features-based approaches to development.

Long-lived feature branches are used to maintain code changes. A developer creates a new feature branch off the trunk and works on it, then creates pull requests to get feedback from team members. Each branch is assigned a role in Gitflow.

Getting More Developers to Connect

If you have more than a couple of developers on the project, you will need to hook up a build server to verify that their commits have not broken the build after they land in the trunk, and also when they are ready to be merged back into the trunk from a short-lived break

SU(3): A Symmetric Branch

The main branch is the source of fixes and releases in trunk-based development. The main branch is assumed to always be stable and ready to deploy in trunk-based development. Continuous integration requires trunk-based development.

Continuous integration is not living up to its potential if build and test processes are automated but developers work on isolated, lengthy feature branches that are rarely integrated into a shared branch. Small batches of updates are encouraged by feature flags. Developers can create a trunk commit that introduces the feature flag and push new trunk commits that build out the feature specification within the flag.

The Problem of Merging and Branching

The author of Continuous Delivery at the time said thatbranching is not the problem, merging is the problem, which is exactly what the team at TBD is trying to solve.

Feature-Aware Integration of Docker Images, Chart Repositories and Language Specific Packages

Depending on the type of project you are working on, what versioned artifacts are usually Docker images, chart repositories, or various language specific packages like NPM or Maven releases. As you work on your next fix or feature, you are also working on a branch that will eventually be merged into the trunk branch, so are other developers.

LaunchDarkly: A Tool for TBD with Feature Flags

Bug fixes are usually the first thing to be done when an emergency hotfix is needed. Your flow must account for a developer who needs to make an urgent change in order to get it all the way through your process and into production. The emphasis on developers working on smaller changes and limited batches has increased due to the use of flow-based delivery practices.

There are times when you must make large, complex changes and you have to adapt your branching strategy. A release branch can be either short-lived or long-lived depending on the strategy. The release branch reflects changes that are intended to be used in the production release process.

LaunchDarkly is a feature flag management provider that allows you to do TBD with feature flags. You can set feature flags to control releases in almost any way you want. LaunchDarkly supports many of the elements that are essential to an organizational release such as scheduling a feature flag update, implementing approvals of feature flag updates, integrating feature flag changes with other external metrics or events, and so on.

Feature flags in large teams

Feature flags are required to succeed in larger teams. The only way to make sure that a shared branch is always releasable is to hide unfinished features behind flags that are turned off.

Testing for New Physics

Every change is reviewed and tested to make sure it reaches the trunk fast. You can find out all about it in the super site. The main development line is called trunk.

Mastering Short-Lived Feature Branch

Teams that are using short-lived feature branches would benefit from aiming to work directly on master, since the practices that they need to have in place to be able to safely do trunk based development deliver numerous benefits: better collaboration, improved quality, collective ownership, and more. The priority of the team is to fix the build if it ever breaks. If the fix was not quick, you should change the broken changes.

The physics of the universe

It can seem a bit daunting. It's very easy for the developer. You just do your work in a branch and deploy it when you are ready with a single command line command.

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