Trunk-based development is now adopted by all four teams. The Cayenne team completed their transition from GitFlow this quarter. Organization-wide deployment frequency is up 300% year-over-year, and our change failure rate has dropped below 5%. Feature flags have become a core part of our development culture.

How It Works For Us

Every developer commits to main (or a short-lived branch that merges within 24 hours). There are no develop, release/*, or hotfix/* branches. The workflow:

1. Developer creates a feature branch from main
2. Work happens in small increments — PRs are typically under 200 lines
3. CI runs on every push: lint, typecheck, test, build (via GitHub Actions)
4. After code review approval, the branch merges to main
5. main is always deployable — broken builds are treated as P0 incidents

Feature Flags

Feature flags are the enabler that makes trunk-based development safe for large features:

• LaunchDarkly manages our flags across all environments
• New features ship behind flags from day one — no long-lived branches
• Flags are cleaned up within 2 sprints of full rollout (enforced by a scheduled reminder)
• We maintain ~40 active flags at any given time; our maximum was 65, which we agreed was too many

DORA Metrics

These improvements came not from trunk-based development alone, but from the practices it forced: smaller changes, better CI, feature flags, and continuous deployment.