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.
What Is Trunk-Based Development?
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.