One line summary
A source-control branching model, where developers collaborate on code in a single branch called ‘trunk’ *, and resist any pressure to create other long-lived development branches by employing one or more documented techniques.
* ‘master’, in Git nomenclature
Trunk Based Development is a key enabler of Continuous Integration, and by extensionContinuous Delivery. When individuals on a team are committing their changes to the trunk multiple times a day it becomes easy to satisfy the core requirement of Continuous Integration that all team members commit to trunk at least once every 24 hours. This ensures the codebase is always releasable on demand and helps to make Continuous Delivery a reality.
Caveats
If you have more than a couple of developers on the project, you are going to need a hook up abuild server to verify their commits
Depending on the team size, and the rate of commits, very short lived feature/task branches are used for code-review and build checking (CI) to happen before commits land in the trunk for other developers to depend on. This allows and engage in eager and continuous code review of contributions before they land in the trunk.
Depending on the intended release cadence, there may be release branches (cut from trunk on a just-in-time basis) that are ‘hardened’ before a release. Alternatively there may also be no release branches if the team is releasing from Trunk.
Teams should become adept with the related branch by abstraction technique for longer to achieve changes, and use feature flags in day to day development to allow for hedging on the order of releases (and other good things - see concurrent development of consecutive releases)
Development teams can casually flex up or down in size (in the trunk). Proof? Google do Trunk Based Development and they have 25000 developers and QA automators in that trunk.
People who practice the Github-flow branching model will feel this is quite similar (there is one small difference).
People who practice the Gitflow branching model will find this very different, as will many developers used to the popular ClearCase, Subversion, Perforce, StarTeam, VCS branching models of the past.
Many publications, including the best-selling Continuous Delivery book promote Trunk Based Development - this is not even controversial any more.
History
Trunk Based Development is not a new branching model. The word ‘trunk’ is referent to the concept of a growing tree, where the fattest and longest span is the trunk, not the branches that radiate from it and are of more limited length.
It has been a lesser known branching model of choice since the mid-nineties, and considered tactically since the eighties. The largest of development organizations, like Google (as mentioned)and Facebook practice it at scale.
Over 30 years different advances to source-control technologies and related tools/techniques have made Trunk Based Development more (and occasionally less) necessary.
This portal
This portal attempts to collect all the related facts, rationale and techniques for Trunk Based Development together
in one place, complete with twenty four diagrams to help explain things. All without using TBD as an acronym
even once twice.