Branching Strategies: A Deep Dive into Trunk-Based Development and GitFlow

As a software engineer, I’ve worked with various development workflows and tools over the years. Among these, two of the most popular branching strategies are Trunk-Based Development and GitFlow.

In this blog post, I am gonna provide a comparison of these two methods, discuss best practices, use cases, the pros and cons of each and also talk about alternatives.

Trunk-Based Development

Trunk-Based Development is a branching strategy in which all developers work on a single branch, usually called ‘trunk’ or ‘main.’

Developers create short-lived feature branches for their tasks and merge them back into the main branch when as quickly as possible, ideally within hours or a day.

Best Practices

1. Keep branches short-lived: Developers should create small, focused branches and merge them back as soon as the feature or bug fix is complete.
2. Continuously integrate: Use Continuous Integration (CI) tools to automatically build and test code changes as they are pushed to the main branch.
3. Feature toggles: Use feature toggles to enable or disable incomplete or experimental features without affecting the main branch.
4. Frequent code reviews: Implement a peer review process for every change to ensure code quality and knowledge sharing.

Use Cases