Working without branches, except for releases, is the most effective way of working, using rebase instead of merge to get a single line of commits. Even release branches can be avoided with continuous deployment.
Why in the world would you do squash merges? ...except to clean up messy mini-branches written by total noobs. I don't do separate commits for funzies. If you want separate commits for ease of review, why not for later reading of the code.
I worked in a team of four between 2017 and 2020 this way. I really enjoyed it. After that I joined a company that worked with PRs. Felt like such a waste of time.
I've rarely seen the first description of it where people actually commit directly to main. Except in very early stage projects. But it does always feel the fastest if you only review code "on-demand" in PRs/MRs instead of enforcing it for every change.
I think in a team with good ownership, enforcing formal reviews slows down a lot. But of course in a larger code base where no single engineer can understand all the effects a change might have, having a bit of knowledge sharing and 4 eyes enforced is often the better approach than yolo-ing it.
Then again I did build an SQL review tool for database access because I felt like "yolo-ing" production access was also not the way it should be. It's an interesting slider between full autonomy and strict review processes where each team needs to find their sweet spot: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet/
In my previous job we worked like this. We had one dev branch that everyone pushed directly to and the dev branch was eventually branched to an RC branch which in turn was merged to master once the release was complete.
The team was small, around 6 people, and the codebase was maybe medium sized (~500k LOC). There was no formal review process, instead it was up to each team member to ensure the quality of their own and others code. In practice I would read through all commits that came in the previous day while having my morning coffee. If there was some egregious I would talk to whoever made to commit to make discuss if something should change, but this was fairly rare.
Formal PR reviews were only ever really used for new members or for bigger/sketchy changes where someone wanted more eyes on it.
Because I ended up reading most commits, I ended up knowing how pretty much the entire codebase worked. It takes a while for this to develop, but the more you do it the better you get at it, especially in the context of a single codebase.
As I understand it, trunk based development does not call for committing directly to main. It says to avoid long-lived branches for releases, whole features, etc.
There's nothing wrong with small, short-lived branches that can be quickly reviewed and merged into main.
That being said, I've been in a small team where the blessed style was to commit directly to main and do reviews "on demand". It quickly gets features deployed in a way that builds a lot of rot and debt into your project that people quickly lose a good understanding of. Then you just keep piling.
There's probably a way to get this done properly with a tiny team of very experienced and well-aligned developers; but that's usually not what you have in an environment that pushes this kind of extreme no-review-interpretation of trunk-based development.
Slow down, do reviews, avoid keeping branches open for more than a day.
I think this is very key, if the development style and the direction of the project is clear, much less review and alignment is necessary.
And also
> avoid keeping branches open for more than a day
Big +1 on that, fast reviews are extremely key. Most teams I have seen often took days or even weeks to merge branches though, often because you end up waiting too long for reviews in the first place. Or because of good old bike-shedding. But also because these code reviews often uncovered uncertainties that needed longer discussions.
However usually code is easy to change, so defaulting to "just merge it" and creating followup tasks is often the cheaper approach than infinite review cycles.
> However usually code is easy to change, so defaulting to "just merge it" and creating followup tasks is often the cheaper approach than infinite review cycles.
I wish this was the "default" mindset everywhere, especially in those cases where you have that one colleague that loves to nitpick everything and doesn't see an issue with holding up both releases and wasting your time over menial pedantic stuff. It would be so much easier to merge working code and let it work, and keep those TODOs in the backlog (e.g. trash).
In a sane world, code review would be like:
1. Will this work and not break anything? We checked it, it's okay. There are no apparent critical or serious issues here.
2. Here's a list of stuff that you can change if you wish, here's why it might be an improvement.
3. Okay, we have some left-over nice to haves, let's keep track of those for later (or not) and merge.
It gets infinitely worse if you're working on 3 projects in parallel and the person wants long winded calls or starts nitpicking about naming, or wants things done exactly their way as if it's the only way (doubly worse if their way is actually worse by most metrics and tastes).
I think it's still worth-while to do reviews. A second pair of eyes does wonders, and it spreads knowledge of what things exist and how they work. If changes are small, reviews can be quick. It's possible to keep building on top of code being reviewed, and even easy when using modern VCS tooling like jujutsu.
Once the code is merged, chances are it will not get changed
Those follow-up tasks will be displaced by more pressing work that will keep piling onto a slightly unstable foundation, increasing the tilt over time.
There is an excluded middle between "no reviews" and "infinite review cycles": proper, timely and efficient reviews. They are worth investing the time to get right. They will start paying dividends months down the line, and boy will they keep paying.
This is not about trying to get things perfect from the get go, but to get them done right while you're there. "We'll fix it later" is not gonna happen, and is much more expensive than it initially seems.
We're organized in small teams around specific products. That leads to mob programming being a good fit, so code reviews and knowledge sharing is organic. This gives us an opportunity to commit to main and do direct deploys to production. Treating every commit as deployable is key, but it drives good practices.
Seriously wish the stacked PR workflow would gain more traction outside of FAANG. Apart from the (somewhat pricey) Graphite offering, there's no standard UI for managing stacked PRs in the wild.
The thing missing with a lot of these branch management posts is release management… because it’s lovely to live in an ideal happy-path world, but what happens when main is tagged for release, only some customers update, main moves of with multiple breaking changes, and only then do some customers require fixes to their releases (who could all be on different i.e even older tags)?
Do you take their tagged release, fix it there, and then send them that branch release with the fix, or do you send them a fix on current main - you know, the main that is now a million releases ahead with multiple breaking changes? And what about all the intermediate release tags? Do you fix each one there too if they have the problem, or do you only update when customers on those releases start having that issue too?
And if you fix to their old tagged release which is incompatible from main, does this mean you have to do this fix twice i.e on their tagged release and also fix it for main? But what if this fix affects other people who are all on different branches too? Now… times this by 20 different customers all running different hardware and different branches with different problems :(
Maybe my comments are off topic, and don’t get me wrong - I prefer “trunk is releasable” motto, but I think maybe as an industry we should all come up with an Acid Test (like the only CSS Acid Tests) so we can through all these branching strategies into the ring
we have a "release" branch and a "develop" branch. The release is trunked on the last released version and (in theory) only gets fixes. If we need to fix a more older version, we create a temporary branch on that version to fix it, and we cherry pick the fixes (or merge to) to release branch and then to develop branch.
The triple mortal loop, comes that we have two versions of the product. One with the old no responsive frontend and other with a modern responsive frontend. And we need to release and develop the two versions for sometime, before the direction decides to kill the old no responsive version. So we end with 4 branches: release, release_rwd, develop and develop_rwd. If we fix something in release, we need to do a diamond merge : release to release_rwd, release to develop, release_rwd to develop_rwd and develop to develop_rwd
I think you're confusing workflows with commit history.
You can work with feature branches all you want, rebase them as you feel like it, and then do squash merges to main.
The likes of GitHub even have a button for this.
especially combined with monorepo
amount of time people spend updating dependencies between internal services and libraries in a pursuit of semver for now reason is just absurd
I think in a team with good ownership, enforcing formal reviews slows down a lot. But of course in a larger code base where no single engineer can understand all the effects a change might have, having a bit of knowledge sharing and 4 eyes enforced is often the better approach than yolo-ing it.
Then again I did build an SQL review tool for database access because I felt like "yolo-ing" production access was also not the way it should be. It's an interesting slider between full autonomy and strict review processes where each team needs to find their sweet spot: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet/
The team was small, around 6 people, and the codebase was maybe medium sized (~500k LOC). There was no formal review process, instead it was up to each team member to ensure the quality of their own and others code. In practice I would read through all commits that came in the previous day while having my morning coffee. If there was some egregious I would talk to whoever made to commit to make discuss if something should change, but this was fairly rare.
Formal PR reviews were only ever really used for new members or for bigger/sketchy changes where someone wanted more eyes on it.
Because I ended up reading most commits, I ended up knowing how pretty much the entire codebase worked. It takes a while for this to develop, but the more you do it the better you get at it, especially in the context of a single codebase.
There's nothing wrong with small, short-lived branches that can be quickly reviewed and merged into main.
That being said, I've been in a small team where the blessed style was to commit directly to main and do reviews "on demand". It quickly gets features deployed in a way that builds a lot of rot and debt into your project that people quickly lose a good understanding of. Then you just keep piling.
There's probably a way to get this done properly with a tiny team of very experienced and well-aligned developers; but that's usually not what you have in an environment that pushes this kind of extreme no-review-interpretation of trunk-based development.
Slow down, do reviews, avoid keeping branches open for more than a day.
I think this is very key, if the development style and the direction of the project is clear, much less review and alignment is necessary.
And also
> avoid keeping branches open for more than a day
Big +1 on that, fast reviews are extremely key. Most teams I have seen often took days or even weeks to merge branches though, often because you end up waiting too long for reviews in the first place. Or because of good old bike-shedding. But also because these code reviews often uncovered uncertainties that needed longer discussions.
However usually code is easy to change, so defaulting to "just merge it" and creating followup tasks is often the cheaper approach than infinite review cycles.
I wish this was the "default" mindset everywhere, especially in those cases where you have that one colleague that loves to nitpick everything and doesn't see an issue with holding up both releases and wasting your time over menial pedantic stuff. It would be so much easier to merge working code and let it work, and keep those TODOs in the backlog (e.g. trash).
In a sane world, code review would be like:
It gets infinitely worse if you're working on 3 projects in parallel and the person wants long winded calls or starts nitpicking about naming, or wants things done exactly their way as if it's the only way (doubly worse if their way is actually worse by most metrics and tastes).Once the code is merged, chances are it will not get changed Those follow-up tasks will be displaced by more pressing work that will keep piling onto a slightly unstable foundation, increasing the tilt over time.
There is an excluded middle between "no reviews" and "infinite review cycles": proper, timely and efficient reviews. They are worth investing the time to get right. They will start paying dividends months down the line, and boy will they keep paying.
This is not about trying to get things perfect from the get go, but to get them done right while you're there. "We'll fix it later" is not gonna happen, and is much more expensive than it initially seems.
> There's nothing wrong with small, short-lived branches that can be quickly reviewed and merged into main.
I would have called this "branch based development", personally.
https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/...
But yeah, that’s what people generally settled on, naming wise.
Seriously wish the stacked PR workflow would gain more traction outside of FAANG. Apart from the (somewhat pricey) Graphite offering, there's no standard UI for managing stacked PRs in the wild.
[1]: https://x.com/jaredpalmer/status/2019817235163074881?s=20
Do you take their tagged release, fix it there, and then send them that branch release with the fix, or do you send them a fix on current main - you know, the main that is now a million releases ahead with multiple breaking changes? And what about all the intermediate release tags? Do you fix each one there too if they have the problem, or do you only update when customers on those releases start having that issue too?
And if you fix to their old tagged release which is incompatible from main, does this mean you have to do this fix twice i.e on their tagged release and also fix it for main? But what if this fix affects other people who are all on different branches too? Now… times this by 20 different customers all running different hardware and different branches with different problems :(
Maybe my comments are off topic, and don’t get me wrong - I prefer “trunk is releasable” motto, but I think maybe as an industry we should all come up with an Acid Test (like the only CSS Acid Tests) so we can through all these branching strategies into the ring
We just cherry-picked stuff back to release branches, if we needed a fix.
The triple mortal loop, comes that we have two versions of the product. One with the old no responsive frontend and other with a modern responsive frontend. And we need to release and develop the two versions for sometime, before the direction decides to kill the old no responsive version. So we end with 4 branches: release, release_rwd, develop and develop_rwd. If we fix something in release, we need to do a diamond merge : release to release_rwd, release to develop, release_rwd to develop_rwd and develop to develop_rwd