Trunk-Based Development: Why Most Teams Think They Use It (But Don’t)

Trunk-Based Development sounds simple. No long-lived branches. Frequent merges. Small, incremental changes. Most teams will tell you: “Yeah, we basically do trunk-based development.” In practice, they don’t. What they usually have is a hybrid that keeps the downsides of feature branches — while pretending to get the benefits of trunk-based development. I’ve seen this pattern in multiple backend teams. On paper, everything looks modern. In reality, delivery is still slow, pull requests are large, and integration is painful. So let’s break down what’s actually going on. The Illusion of Trunk-Based Development Ask a team how they work, and you’ll often hear something like: “We merge to main frequently” “We don’t keep branches for too long” “We try to keep PRs small” Sounds good. But then you look closer: PRs are open for 3–5 days branches still contain multiple features merges are delayed because reviews are slow developers are afraid to merge unfinished work This is not trunk-based devel