Question

A development team practicing continuous delivery is struggling with long-lived feature branches that cause painful merge conflicts and delay integration by weeks. Leadership wants developers to integrate their code into the main line at least daily while still being able to hide incomplete functionality from end users in production. Which combination of practices best achieves this goal?

Accepted Answer

Adopt trunk-based development with frequent small commits to the main branch, using feature flags to keep unfinished functionality dormant in production

Answer

Continue using long-lived feature branches but require a mandatory two-week integration freeze before each release

Answer

Create a separate release branch per developer and merge all of them only at the end of the quarter

Answer

Disable automated builds until all feature branches are fully complete to avoid triggering broken pipelines