At one point or the other, we have all found ourselves guilty of trying to merge our changes before everyone else’ to avoid bearing the pain of resolving the infamous merge conflict hell.
Often resolving merge conflicts takes up a huge chunk of the development time and is sometimes even accepted as a norm.
Is it possible to reclaim this time and go faster?
Let us start by understanding a few of the most popular and adopted development strategies when working in teams.
Trunk based development
It is a development strategy where developers work on the main/trunk/master branch. Branches are only created when it is absolutely necessary.
These branches are short-lived and merged into the main branch frequently so as to keep the main branch updated.
The idea is that since only one long-lived branch is present which is frequently merged into, there will be very least or zero conflicts at any given time. The basis of TBD is to merge as frequently as possible irrespective of that fact the feature is complete or not.
