Julian Richter

Trunk-Based Development at Scale: Real-World Insights from a High-Traffic Luxury E-Commerce Platform

A high-traffic e-commerce platform commits directly to main. Discover their secret to high-velocity development without breaking production.

Trunk-Based Development at Scale: Real-World Insights from a High-Traffic Luxury E-Commerce Platform
#1about 2 minutes

Defining trunk-based development and straight to production

Trunk-based development is a branching model where developers commit small, frequent changes directly to a single main branch that deploys automatically.

#2about 2 minutes

Understanding the core principles of trunk-based development

Successful trunk-based development relies on small frequent commits, robust continuous integration, and feature toggles to hide incomplete work from users.

#3about 5 minutes

Shifting from a "my code" to an "our code" culture

Unlike feature branching which leads to merge conflicts and delayed feedback, trunk-based development fosters a collaborative culture through pair programming and real-time feedback.

#4about 1 minute

Calculating the high financial cost of production downtime

Breaking down yearly revenue to per-minute losses highlights the significant financial risk of pushing breaking changes to a high-traffic production environment.

#5about 2 minutes

Building a testing foundation with unit tests

The testing pyramid's base layer consists of fast, easy-to-write unit tests and static linting to catch issues early for every line of code.

#6about 2 minutes

Ensuring API and service stability with integration tests

The middle of the testing pyramid uses integration tests, contract tests for APIs, and load tests to prevent performance regressions and breaking changes between services.

#7about 4 minutes

Verifying the user interface with automated UI tests

The top of the testing pyramid includes visual regression tests to catch unintended style changes and end-to-end tests to validate critical user flows.

#8about 3 minutes

Integrating performance, accessibility, and security tests

A comprehensive testing strategy includes automated Lighthouse checks for performance and accessibility compliance, alongside periodic security and penetration testing.

#9about 2 minutes

A practical guide to adopting trunk-based development

Teams can transition to trunk-based development by auditing branch lifetimes, enforcing smaller pull requests, introducing feature flags, and fostering a strong review culture.

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