Best practices of Trunk based development
The principle behind trunk-based development is to assimilate every change as soon as possible in version control. It ensures the teams to release code quickly and consistently. The following is a list of exercises and practices that will help will refine your teams cadence and develop an optimized release schedule. In Software Development best practices for trunk-based development include the following steps as mentioned here.
- Develop in small batches:– It follows a quick rhythm to deliver code to production. if trunk-based development was like music it would be a short notes in rapid succession, with the repository commits being the notes.
- Feature flags:– It is nicely complement trunk-based development by enabling developers to wrap new changes in an inactive code path and activate it at a later time. This allows developers to forgo creating a separate repository feature branch and instead commit new feature code directly to the main branch within a feature flag path.
- Build fast and execute immediately:– In order to maintain a quick release cadence, build and test execution times should be optimized. CI/CD build tools should use caching layers where appropriate to avoid expensive computations for static.
- Having reduced number of code freezes and integration phases:– Trunk based development teams should try to avoid blocking code freezes and plan accordingly to ensure the release pipeline is not stalled. It updates are constantly flowing.
- It perform asynchronous code reviews:– In trunk-based development, code review should be performed immediately and not put into an asynchronous system for later review. Automated tests provide a layer of pre-emptive code review. It gives the reviewer immediate reassurance that the new code meets specific specifications.
- It simple to conclude that Develop, Code, Commit, Plan, Test, Manage.
Trunk-Based Development in Software Development
In earlier days of software development, programmers didn’t have the richness of modern version control systems but they developed two versions of their software concurrently as it means of monitoring small changes and backing them if possible and only in necessary conditions. As time increases it has become more costly, and inefficient.
Trunk Based Development
At present various version control systems are developed and managed. It made it more mature, and various departments have merged which enables programmers to find bugs or errors more easily. As of today most developers hold one of the two development models in order to deliver quality software which is Git flow and trunk-based development. Trunk-based development is an additional open model since all developers have easier access to the main code which also enables teams to implement CI/CD and so on.