Can you end code freezes?
Does your team face code freezes? What's preventing you from using trunk-based development and continuous integration to thaw your code once and for all?A quick reminder: Tomorrow at 17:00 CET (Europe) / 8:00 AM PT (USA), I’ll be doing a free, live video Q&A session answering your DevOps career questions. Space is limited! Register up now!
At the first company where I worked as a programmer, every few months we'd declare a "code freeze." During this time, we were preparing for a release, so no new changes were allowed into the code, except bug fixes found during testing of the release.
It took me a while to realize that for the kinds of software most companies produce, this is actually an anti-pattern. What’s the alternative? Trunk-based development. I’ve talked about it before, but a passage in Accelerate drew my attention to this again:
[High-performing teams] had fewer than three active branches at any time, their branches had very short lifetimes (less than a day) before being merged into trunk and never had “code freeze” or stabilization periods.
Does your team face code freezes? If so, what’s preventing you from using trunk-based development and continuous integration to thaw your code once and for all?
