All developers commit to a single shared branch (trunk/main) at least once a day, with three or fewer active branches and no long-lived feature branches or integration phases. DORA’s research finds this correlates with the full software-delivery performance bundle: faster delivery, lower change failure rate, faster recovery, higher availability.
The anti-pattern is long-lived feature branches. They create invisible inventory of queued changes, multiply merge-conflict risk, delay feedback, and make integration a distinct phase rather than a continuous activity. Three indicators distinguish trunk-based teams from the rest: ≤3 active branches, daily merges to trunk, no integration freezes.
Required infrastructure is fast CI (minutes, not hours), comprehensive automated tests, and feature flags to decouple deployment from release. The cultural objection — “what if someone breaks trunk?” — is answered by fast tests, small batches, and treating a broken trunk as an immediate fix rather than a blame event. Sits alongside Frequent Deployments Improve Stability and Test-Driven Development in the Lean Flow Theory cluster.