Why trunk-based development dominates Git?

Choosing the right Git branching strategy is a crucial piece of an efficient software development workflow. There are different ways to manage code branching, each with its own advantages and tradeoffs, and understanding the differences between these strategies is the first step toward choosing the one most suitable for your team and project. In this article we will briefly explore the main strategies and then focus on Trunk-Based Development, an approach that is gaining considerable popularity among modern teams oriented toward DevOps practices.

The main branching strategies

Feature branching consists of developing each feature or bugfix in a dedicated branch, isolating work from other developers and protecting the main branch from unstable changes. The approach ensures the main branch stays stable during development, but it easily leads to long-lived branches that accumulate divergence from the common trunk, significantly increasing the risk of conflicts at merge time.

GitFlow is a structured strategy that introduces separate branches for active development, release preparation, urgent production hotfixes, and individual features. This model is well suited to complex projects with scheduled release cycles and larger teams, because it defines precisely the path each change must follow toward production. The downside is that the structure can feel overly elaborate for smaller teams or for products that require frequent iterations.

GitHub Flow simplifies the previous model by keeping a main branch that is always ready for deployment. Changes are developed in short-lived branches, reviewed through pull requests, and quickly integrated into the trunk. The approach fits teams that release continuously, although its simplicity does not eliminate the need for rigorous discipline in code review.

GitLab Flow is similar to GitHub Flow but adds support for environment-specific branches such as staging or production, making it possible to track precisely which version of the code is present in each environment. It is particularly useful for teams using integrated platforms like GitLab CI/CD that need to manage deployments across multiple environments in an orderly way.

Trunk-Based Development (TBD)

Trunk-Based Development stands out for its simplicity and speed compared to all the strategies described above. Unlike approaches that rely on multiple and often long-lived branches, TBD encourages developers to work directly on the main branch, keeping it always stable and ready for deployment. The underlying philosophy is that frequent integration in small increments reduces overall project risk far more effectively than any branch-based isolation scheme.

In practice, developers make frequent and incremental commits directly to the trunk, or on very short-lived branches that are integrated within hours or at most a few days. Every commit triggers an automated build and test cycle that ensures the continuous stability of the main branch. When a feature is still incomplete but must be integrated to allow other developers to work on related components, feature toggles come into play: configurable switches that enable or disable the behavior in production without needing to maintain separate branches or wait for dedicated releases.

The advantages of TBD in production

The most immediate benefit of Trunk-Based Development is a dramatic reduction in merge conflicts. With frequent commits and very short-lived branches, divergences between developers are identified and resolved quickly, avoiding those exhausting integration sessions that in long-lived branch models can block the team for days. Code quality benefits directly, because automated tests executed on every commit create a continuous safety net that prevents the trunk from accumulating silent regressions.

Another significant advantage concerns release speed. Since the trunk is always in a deployable state, the release cycle becomes faster and more predictable, decoupling the decision to release from the technical readiness of the code. This natural alignment with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery practices makes TBD a preferred choice for teams operating in mature DevOps environments, where deployment frequency is an indicator of process health rather than an additional risk.

When to adopt it and how to start

Trunk-Based Development is particularly suited to teams already practicing continuous integration, to projects with rapid release cycles or continuous deployments, and to organizations that want to reduce the operational complexity of their development process. The necessary condition is having a sufficiently broad and reliable automated test suite: without this safety net, trunk stability depends entirely on the individual discipline of each developer, which quickly proves unsustainable. Code review practices also need to adapt, shifting toward smaller and more frequent reviews that can be completed in minutes rather than large batch reviews that accumulate over days.

For teams accustomed to strategies like GitFlow, the transition to TBD may require an adjustment period. The most effective path is gradual, reducing the average lifetime of existing branches before eliminating long-lived branches entirely, while simultaneously investing in test automation. A practical starting point is setting an explicit maximum branch lifetime, such as two days, and treating any branch that exceeds that threshold as a signal worth investigating rather than a normal occurrence. Teams that complete this transition report almost unanimously a reduction in the cognitive load associated with branch management and an improved ability to respond quickly to user feedback, two benefits that translate directly into better products.