If you’ve been following my previous posts, you know I’m a big advocate for Trunk-Based Development and shrinking your pull requests until they almost feel too small. In a perfect world, developers merge code directly into the main branch multiple times a day, everything flows smoothly, and production remains rock solid.
But let’s be honest. When you actually try to pitch this to a backend team working on a core system, you almost always hit the exact same wall of resistance.
Someone in the back of the room will inevitably raise their hand and ask: “That sounds great in theory, but I’m currently refactoring our legacy checkout service. It’s going to take me four days of deep architectural changes. Are you seriously telling me I should merge half-baked, broken code into the main trunk and push it straight to production where real customers are buying our products?”
It’s a completely valid objection. If your only tool for hiding uncompleted work is holding onto a massive, long-lived feature branch, then trunk-based development breaks down immediately. You end up with the exact nightmare we talked about earlier: huge code reviews, painful merge conflicts, and code that rots before it ever sees a live environment.
