Continuous Integration vs Feature Branch Workflow

Dave Farley explains why continuous integration and feature branching are mutually exclusive and how to adopt true CI practices.

Continuous Integration and Feature Branching are both very popular ways of organising work in a development team, but they are mutually exclusive for most cases. This is counter to what many, maybe most people think. In this video Dave Farley explains the difference and why the two are largely mutually exclusive, and then explains how to live in the CI world by describing three different approaches to keeping the software working as it evolves. Software engineering, any engineering, is all about trade-offs, the trade-off at the heart of CI is that to avoid conflicts our aim is to integrate our code with that of our co-workers as close to “continuously” as we can, that means that we can’t afford to wait until we are finished. If we take that idea one step further into Continuous Delivery, then every change may end up being deployed into production, so we need to grow our software, through many small changes, committing multiple times per-day, and be comfortable that, at any point in that process, the software may be released into production. How do we use ideas like dark-launching, branch-by-abstraction and feature-flags to help? RERERENCES: Trunk Based Development ➡️ trunkbaseddevelopment.com/ Read More About Branching ➡️ martinfowler.com/articles/branching-patterns.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 🎓 CD TRAINING COURSES 🎓 If you want to learn Continuous Delivery and DevOps skills, check out Dave Farley's courses ➡️ bit.ly/DFTraining 📚 BOOKS: 📖 Dave’s NEW BOOK "Modern Software Engineering" is now available on Amazon ➡️ amzn.to/3DwdwT3 In this book, Dave brings together his ideas and proven techniques to describe a durable, coherent and foundational approach to effective software development, for programmers, managers and technical leads, at all levels of experience. 📖 "Continuous Delivery Pipelines" by Dave Farley paperback ➡️ amzn.to/3gIULlA ebook version ➡️ leanpub.com/cd-pipelines 📖 The original award-winning "Continuous Delivery" book by Dave Farley and Jez Humble ➡️ amzn.to/2WxRYmx 📖 "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change", Kent Beck ➡️ amzn.to/2GpQRjE 📖 "Accelerate, The science of Lean Software and DevOps", by Nicole Fosgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim ➡️ amzn.to/2YYf5Z8 📖 "The DevOps Handbook", by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois & John Willis ➡️ amzn.to/2LsoPmr amzn.to/2LsoPmr ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 📧 JOIN CD MAIL LIST 📧 Keep up to date with the latest discussions, free "How To..." guides, events and online courses, and get Dave’s FREE guide on “Continuous Integration Top Tips” here ➡️ subscribepage.com/howto-ci-guide Dave Farley's Blog ➡️ bit.ly/DaveFWebBlog Dave Farley on Twitter ➡️ bit.ly/DaveFTwitter Dave Farley on LinkedIn ➡️ bit.ly/DaveF-L