Trunk-based development is the practice of all developers working in a single branch, integrating their code frequently.

Its impact is seen through reduced merge conflicts, streamlined collaboration, and faster release cycles, ultimately enhancing organizational efficiency.

Unfortunately, trunk-based development is not widely spread, and even rejected by some developers. But if you have suffered the merge hell — plenty of conflicts every time that there is a merge — , you may also notice that refactor to fix code debt becomes more difficult. Keeping the code clean with too many — long-lived — branches make cleaning harder.