XP2017 - Feature Branching is Evil

Feature branching is one of the most commonly accepted practices in the IT industry. It is mainly used to control quality and to control feature delivery. However, many times the inverse is true. Branches break the flow of the IT delivery process, reducing both stability and throughput. Unfortunately, oftentimes teams are not aware of this. They truly think they are doing the right thing.

The session explores why teams are using feature branches, what problems are introduced by using them and what techniques exist to avoid them altogether. It explores exactly what's evil about feature branches, which is not necessarily the problems they introduce - but rather, the real reasons why teams are using them.

After the session, you'll understand a different branching strategy, how it relates to Continuous Integration and how it will predict better quality and higher delivery throughput.

Learning outcomes - you will be able to:

- understand why teams are using feature branching
- explain why feature branching is problematic
- describe alternatives to feature branching
- run an experiment with trunk-based development

Transcript

1. @tdpauw@mastodon.social thinkinglabs.io Feature Branching is Evil Thierry de Pauw | consulting CTO takes questions at the end of the session Ghent, Belgium On the left, Korenlei On the right, Graslei
2. Being vulnerable … I’m shy and introverted
3. A tale of 2 teams
4. “Like all powerful tools, there are many ways you can use them (DVCS), and not all of them are good.” -- On DVCS, continuous integration, and feature branches, Jez Humble
5. -- 2016 State of DevOps Report
6. Some definitions ...
7. Mainline is the line of development which is the reference from which the builds of your system are created that feed into your deployment pipeline. -- Jez Humble
8. Feature Branching is a practice where people do not merge their code into mainline until the feature they are working on is "done" (but not “done done”). -- Jez Humble
9. Continuous Integration is a practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently - usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build […]. -- Martin Fowler
10. The goal of an Organisation is to sustainably minimise the lead time to create positive business impact.
11. Why long-running branches ?
12. It allows us to work in isolation. Therefore we are more productive.
13. "Developing in isolation can help an individual go faster but it does not help a team go faster. Merge time and rework cannot be estimated and will vary wildly, and the team can only go as fast as the slowest merge." -- Steve Smith
14. If a refactoring goes nowhere we can just delete it.
15. “A spike solution is a very simple program to explore potential solutions. Build the spike to only address the problem under examination and ignore all other concerns. Most spikes are not good enough to keep, so expect to throw it away.” -- extremeprogramming.org, Don Wells
16. It allows us to control the quality of what goes into production.
17. "The objective is to eliminate unfit release candidates as early in the process as we can ... You are effectively prevented from releasing into production builds that are not thoroughly tested and found to be fit for their intended purpose." -- Continuous Delivery, Jez Humble and Dave Farley
18. It allows us to control which features get into production.
19. "Feature Branching is a poor man's modular architecture, instead of building systems with the ability to easy swap in and out features at runtime/deploy-time they couple themselves to the source control providing this mechanism through manual merging." -- Dan Bodart
20. Why is this a problem ?
21. Feature Branching delays feedback. => Continuous Isolation
22. Feature Branching hinders integration of features. Promiscuous Integration ???
23. Feature Branching hides work for the rest of the team. frequently merging back to mainline = communicating with your team
24. Feature Branching works against refactoring.
25. Feature Branching creates inventory. inventory = money stuck in the system
26. Feature Branching increases risk.
27. Feature Branching creates cognitive overload.
28. How can we avoid this ?
29. Continuous Integration Your application is always in a releasable state on main line. Trunk Based Development
30. The Practices that Make Continuous Integration https://thinkinglabs.io/articles/2022/06/14/the-practices-that-make-continuous-integration.html
31. always commit on Green. decoupled code base. lots of fast tests. Break large changes into a set of small incremental changes.
32. Hide unfinished new functionality.
33. Use Expand-Contract when performing large refactorings.
35. Feature Toggles to decouple feature release from code deployment.
36. Feature Toggles done badly are evil too !
37. A frequently asked question
38. When mature enough no Code Reviews. Pair Programming => Continuous Code Review post-commit review • pre-merge: short lived branches + Pull Request • post-merge: review all commits on mainline How to perform Code Reviews ?
39. Benefits
40. => more frequent builds => more frequent deployments => reduced Time to Market => more experiments => uncover more unmet needs More frequent commits to mainline
41. => uncovers more problems earlier => fix problems immediately => build quality in => better Stability & Quality More frequent builds
42. Where is the evilness ?
43. … and slow builds
44. "Trunk-based development requires a big mindset shift. Engineers thought trunk-based development would never work, but once they started, they could not imagine ever going back." -- Gary Gruver, Directory of Engineering for HP's LaserJet Firmware division
45. @tdpauw@mastodon.social thinkinglabs.io Engineer at the fintech startup Abbove.com Founder of ThinkingLabs, advisory firm on IT delivery Hello, I am Thierry de Pauw is chief imposter likes dark chocolate dark means > 50% cacao, prefers 70% and more Article series: https://thinkinglabs.io/on-the-evilness-of-feature-branching
46. Resources SCM Patterns (ch 4 Mainline; ch 5 Active Development Line), Stephen Berczuk and Brad Appleton Growing Object Oriented Software guided by Tests, p172 Keyhole Surgery for Software, Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce Continuous Delivery (ch 14 Advanced Version Control), Jez Humble and Dave Farley The Role of Continuous Delivery in IT and Organizational Performance, Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble The State of DevOps Report 2016, Alanna Brown, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Nigel Kersten and Gene Kim DevOps Handbook (ch 11 Enable and Practice CI), Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and John Willis Accelerate (ch 4 Technical Practices), Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humbe and Gene Kim Measuring Continuous Delivery (ch 7 The Mainline Throughput indicator), Steve Smith trunkbaseddevelopment.com ThoughtWorks Technology Radar on GitFlow Continuous Integration on a dollar a day, James Shore On DVCS and Continuous Delivery, Jez Humble Why software development methodologies suck, Jez Humble Don't Feature Branch, Dave Farley Feature Branch, Martin Fowler Version Control Stragies series, Steve Smith
47. More Resources More Feature Branches means less Continuous Integration, InfoQ interview with Steve Smith The Death of Continuous Integration, Steve Smith Long-Running Branches Considered Harmfull, Jade Rubick An e-mail conversation with Steve Smith on Trunk Based Development Continuous Isolation, Paul Hammant What is Trunk Based Development ?, Paul Hammant Trunk Based Development, Jon Arild Tørresdal You Are What You Eat, Dave Hounslow Google's Scaled Trunk Based Development, Paul Hammant Legacy App Reju venation, Paul Hammant Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository ?, Google The history of “Taking Baby Steps”, Adrian Bolboaca Baby Steps TDD approach, David Völkel 4 Simple Tricks to avoid Merge Conflicts, Robert Mißbach From GitFlow to Trunk Based Development, Robert Mißbach Short-lived branches, Corey Haines
48. Even More Resources Introducing Branch by Abstraction, Paul Hammant Branch by Abstraction, Martin Fowler Make Large Scale Changes Incrementally with Branch by Abstraction, Jez Humble branchbyabstraction.com Feature Toggles, Pete Hodgson #NoStaging - Pipeline Conf 2016, Dave Nolan When Feature Flags go Wrong, Edith Harbaugh Managing Feature Flag Debt with Split, Adil Aijaz Continuous Delivery and Code Review from the Continuous Delivery Google Group Theory X and Theory Y from Wikipedia Continuous Review, Paul Hammant Non-Continuous Review, Paul Hammant Code Review: Why are we doing it ?, Sandro Mancuso Code Reviews in Trunk Based Development, Robert Mißbach A conversation in the SoCraTes Slack #codereview channel on … Code Reviews and Trunk Based Development A reply on Twitter by Michiel Rook regarding When code reviews would not be required