Feature Branching is Evil

Wednesday, January 10 • 11 AM – 12:30 PM ET

Feature branching is one of the most commonly accepted practices in the IT industry. It is mainly used to control quality and feature delivery. However, many times the inverse is true. Branches break the flow of the IT delivery process, reducing both stability and throughput. Unfortunately, oftentimes teams are not aware of this. They truly think they are doing the right thing.

This session explores why teams are using feature branches, what problems are introduced by using them, and what techniques exist to avoid them altogether. It explores exactly what’s evil about feature branches, which is not necessarily the problems they introduce – but rather, the real reasons why teams are using them.

At the end of the session, you’ll understand a different branching strategy, how it relates to Continuous Integration, and how it will predict better quality and higher delivery throughput.

Learning outcomes – you will be able to:

• understand why teams are using feature branching
• explain why feature branching is problematic
• describe alternatives to feature branching
• understand if all teams can adopt trunk-based development

Meet Thierry de Pauw

Thierry is a lean IT Engineer at the fintech startup Abbove. On the side, he founded ThinkingLabs, an advisory firm for optimizing IT delivery. From time to time he is asked to conduct technology due diligence to review the technology capabilities of organizations for investors. Thierry is a CI/CD advocate and jack-of-all-trades. Instead of balancing quality & delivery, he believes and practices that better quality is actually a way to more and better deliveries.