code.talks 2023 - Our journey from Gitflow to Trunk Based Development

by: Ludovic Toison
After having practiced Gitflow for years, we have adopted a Trunk Based Development approach to support our product growth.
During this session, we will shortly recall the differences between both branching strategies before explaining why we shifted to Trunk Based Development. We will then describe the steps we have conducted to adopt this new paradigm: How did we restructure our software development lifecycle? Which initiatives have we set up to enable this change? How did we leverage Feature Flags to achieve Continuous Deployment? How Feature Environments and Non-Regression Tests increased our confidence in shipping to production every day. Which mistakes did we make when implementing it? By the end of the presentation, you should have a complete overview of Trunk Based Development to help you to decide if you should consider it for your engineering teams.

[@illyam689]

automatic environment creation is interesting, is there any open source projects that does this already?

[@rorycawley]

We even bother with short lived branches when you are using feature flags?

[@illyam689]

if you have 20 people working on the same codebase, probably you have worse problems than Gitflow

[@thiccboi6211]

have you ever worked in a company of any size?

[@illyam689]

@@thiccboi6211 of course. Unless the project structure is really modular (which usually is not) and teams don't step on each other's toes (which usually happens), it is a pain in the ass.

[@ForgottenKnight1]

What were the challenges that you encountered, how did you solve them and what were the tradeoffs ?

[@illyam689]

@@ForgottenKnight1 I wrote a long comment some time ago but it disappeared 🤯🤯 sorry