One strategy that helps a team stay in sync with changes to the codebase is known as trunk-based development. Learn more about this strategy in this post.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. When coding an application, it is important to remain in sync with the other engineers working on the project. One strategy that helps a team stay in sync with codebase changes is trunk-based development. When employing trunk-based development, the developers working on a project make all their code changes in a common branch known as «trunk». There are numerous benefits to developing with this approach, which we will discuss in this article. Trunk-based development is a version control management practice where developers merge small, frequent updates to a core trunk or main branch. It’s a common practice among DevOps teams and part of the DevOps lifecycle, as it streamlines merging and integration phases. In fact, trunk-based development is a required practice of CI/CD. Developers can create short-lived branches with a few small commits compared to other long-lived feature branching strategies. As codebase complexity and team size grow, trunk-based development helps keep production releases flowing. Trunk-based development (TBD) is a branching model for software development where developers merge every new feature, bug fix, or other code change to one central branch in the version control system. This branch is called “trunk”. Trunk-based development enables continuous integration and continuous delivery by creating an environment where commits to the trunk naturally occur multiple times daily for each programmer. This makes it easy to meet the requirement of continuous integration, and have codebase to be releasable at any time, as is necessary for continuous delivery and continuous deployment. In trunk-based development, developers push code directly into the trunk. Changes made in the release branches, or snapshots of the code when it’s ready to be released, are usually merged back to the trunk as soon as possible.
