Branch: only when necessary, on incompatible policy, late, and instead of freeze Laura Wingerd & Christopher Seiwald (1998’s High-Level SCM Best Practices white paper from Perforce) If a team is pushing production releases monthly, then they are also going to have to push bug-fix releases between planned releases. To facilitate that, it is common for Trunk-Based Development Teams to make a release branch on a just in time basis - say a few days before the release.

Introduction Trunk-Based Development is not a new branching model. The word ‘trunk’ is referent to the concept of a growing tree, where the fattest and longest span is the trunk, not the branches that radiate from it and are of more limited length. It has been a lesser known branching model of choice since the mid-nineties and considered tactically since the eighties. The largest of development organizations, like Google (as mentioned) and Facebook practice it at scale.