Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Recent posts by Dave Farley and Jim Kinsey , and the release of the Accelerate book by Forsgren et al appear to be bringing dysfunctional development practices firmly into the spotlight once again, most specifically the practice of combining feature branching and automated builds, while calling it “continuous integration". I have already written my own opinion piece on the practice . In summary, I hate it - in a modern, collocated team it is wasteful, suppresses fast feedback, and completely undermines the advantages of powerful teamwork enabled by continuous integration. It harks back to a software dark age that I honestly thought our industry had finally left behind. It really is Continuing Isolation. But perhaps the most damning piece of research about Feature Branching that has come out in recent years is best summarised by Dave Farley: If you are not merging your changes to Trunk at least daily, [the research] predicts that your outcomes are more closely aligned with...