Managing Multiple Features

Photo by Anja Bauermann on Unsplash

The intention of this blog post is to provide a proposal for managing multiple features developed in an app which is inspired from trunk based development. 

During an app development, there might be many features which are developed simultaneously, and each feature might have a different release target date. If trunk based development is not used, then If Feature A needs to be released in Release X, developers create pull requests against both the main and releaseX branches. This is because different features are shipped with different releases but development is not stopping. This has some disadvantages. Managing multiple release branches simultaneously can cause chaos:

1. Forgetting to merge a feature into a specific release branch.

2. Difficulty in keeping track of features across branches.

3. Reverting a feature from a release branch requires a pull request.