Stop Using GitFlow: Why Trunk-Based Development is the Secret to Elite Velocity

You’ve likely spent a frustrated Friday afternoon squinting at 400 lines of merge conflicts because a feature branch lived two weeks too long. It’s a soul-crushing ritual we’ve accepted as "the cost of doing business," but it’s actually a symptom of a workflow that’s holding your team back from elite performance.

The GitFlow Trap

For years, GitFlow was the gold standard. You have master, develop, feature/*, release/*, and hotfix/*. On paper, it looks organized. In practice, it’s a recipe for "integration hell."

The problem is isolation. When you work on a branch for five days, you aren't integrating; you’re diverging. You’re building a private reality that gets harder to merge back into the collective truth with every passing hour. I’ve seen teams spend more time managing the "flow" than actually writing code.

If your "Definition of Done" includes a massive, terrifying merge at the end of the week, you aren't doing Continuous Integration (CI). You're doing Periodic Integration.

What is Trunk-Based Development (TBD)?

Trunk-Based Development is dead simple: everyone merges to a single branch (usually main or master) at least once a day.

There are no long-lived feature branches. If you use branches at all, they are "short-lived" (think hours, not days) and are deleted immediately after merging.

Why this works:
1. Tiny Merge Conflicts: Merging three lines of code is trivial. Merging 3,000 lines is a nightmare.
2. Real CI: Your CI/CD pipeline actually means something when it tests the *actual* state of the shared code every few hours.
3. Refactoring is Possible: In GitFlow, if I rename a core class on my branch, I just broke everyone else's branch. In TBD, everyone sees that change immediately and adjusts.

The "How": Feature Flags are the Secret Sauce

The biggest pushback I hear is: *"But how can I merge unfinished code into production?!"*

The answer is Feature Flags (or Feature Toggles). You decouple *deployment* (moving code to a server) from *release* (turning the feature on for users).

Instead of keeping code on a separate branch, you wrap it in a conditional.

// This lives in the main branch, even if the feature isn't done.
import { useFeatureFlag } from './services/flags';

const NewCheckoutExperience = () => {
  const isEnabled = useFeatureFlag('enable_beta_checkout');

  if (!isEnabled) {
    return <OldCheckout />;
  }

  return (
    <div>
      {/* Our half-finished, experimental code */}
      <h1>New Shiny Checkout</h1>
      <button onClick={handleNewLogic}>Pay Now</button>
    </div>
  );
};

By using flags, you can push "incomplete" code safely. It’s behind a gate. The code is technically in production, but no user sees it. This allows you to keep your local environment perfectly synced with the rest of the team.

The Discipline of Small Commits

Moving to TBD requires a mindset shift. You have to learn how to break big features into tiny, atomic chunks.

If I’m building a new API endpoint, my commit history might look like this:
1. Add the database migration. (Merge to main)
2. Add the internal service logic with unit tests. (Merge to main)
3. Add the API controller, hidden behind a flag. (Merge to main)
4. Flip the flag. (Release!)

Each of those merges is low-risk. If something breaks in step 2, I know exactly what caused it, and I only have to revert 50 lines of code, not a week’s worth of work.

What About Code Reviews?

"If we merge every few hours, when do we do Pull Requests (PRs)?"

This is where things get opinionated. Elite teams often move toward Pair Programming or Mob Programming as a form of synchronous code review. If two people wrote the code together, it’s already reviewed. They ship directly to trunk.

If your team isn't ready for that, use Short-Lived PRs. The rule is: the PR must be small enough to be reviewed in 10 minutes and merged within 4 hours. If a PR stays open overnight, it’s a liability.

The "Gotcha": The Testing Hurdle

You cannot do Trunk-Based Development without a robust automated test suite. If you rely on a manual QA team to "sign off" on every release, TBD will feel like chaos.

TBD is the "Elite" tier for a reason—it forces you to fix your testing culture. You need:
* Fast unit tests (running in seconds).
* Reliable integration tests.
* A CI pipeline that fails the build if main is broken.

Is it worth the switch?

The DORA research (DevOps Research and Assessment) consistently shows that high-performing teams favor Trunk-Based Development. It leads to higher deployment frequency, lower lead time for changes, and—interestingly—more stable systems.

Stop babying your branches. Kill the develop branch. Start merging to main. It’ll be uncomfortable for the first week, but once you stop fearing the merge, you’ll never want to go back to the "flow" again.