What Is Trunk-Based Development?

Chapter 3. How Do You Practice Trunk-Based Development?

Heads up: there’s some people stuff in Chapter 4 that’s more important than this technical stuff. I’m starting with the technical bits because I know these are the questions many people will ask first, but none of this is worth a damn if you don’t get the people stuff right.

But now that you know why trunk-based development is a good idea, I’m going to describe the approach in some detail.

Prerequisites

A word of caution: you’ll need to prepare properly first. If you want to adopt a trunk-based approach but don’t have the prerequisites described in this section, you can’t expect to go from 0 to 100 quickly. MMMSS does not apply only to writing software; it can also apply to the journey from a branch-based approach to CTBD. You can gradually change the way you develop software, moving bit by bit and arriving finally at CTBD. Pick one element at a time and change your team’s habits gradually. You don’t have to implement everything all at once.

To be successful, it will be helpful to have the following:

Enthusiasm

You need people, both in leadership and at the team level, who believe TBD is a good idea. (Show them this report if you like.)

Time

Have a realistic time frame for your shift to TBD, and make time within the workday both to make changes to your current systems and to pay attention to the effects. To give you some idea of what to expect, one of the case studies detailed in The DevOps Handbook took three years ...