Git Workflow Affects Delivery Speed

Your Git branching strategy directly affects how fast your team ships features, how often deployments break, and how much time is spent resolving merge conflicts. At Nexis Limited, we use trunk-based development for most projects, with GitHub Flow for open-source contributions.

Trunk-Based Development

All developers commit to a single main branch (trunk). Feature branches are short-lived (hours to 1-2 days) and merged frequently. The trunk is always deployable.

How It Works

  1. Create a short-lived feature branch from main.
  2. Make small, incremental changes with frequent commits.
  3. Open a PR, get a quick review, and merge — ideally within the same day.
  4. Main is deployed to production continuously or on a regular cadence.
  5. Use feature flags to hide incomplete features from users.

Best For

  • Teams practicing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
  • Teams with good test coverage and automated deployment pipelines.
  • SaaS products where a single version is deployed.

GitHub Flow

A simpler branch-based workflow: create a feature branch from main, make changes, open a pull request, review, merge to main, and deploy. Main is always deployable.

How It Works

  1. Create a feature branch from main with a descriptive name.
  2. Commit changes to the feature branch.
  3. Open a pull request for review and discussion.
  4. Merge to main after approval. Delete the feature branch.
  5. Deploy from main.

Best For

  • Open-source projects with external contributors.
  • Small to medium teams that want simplicity.
  • Projects where PRs need thorough review before merging.

GitFlow

A structured workflow with multiple long-lived branches: main (production), develop (integration), feature branches, release branches, and hotfix branches.

When It Makes Sense

  • Products with formal release cycles (versioned desktop or mobile apps).
  • Multiple versions maintained simultaneously (libraries with LTS branches).
  • Regulated environments requiring release documentation.

When to Avoid

  • SaaS products with continuous deployment — GitFlow adds unnecessary overhead.
  • Small teams — the ceremony of multiple branches slows down delivery.
  • When you find yourself "saving up" features for a release instead of deploying continuously.

Practical Recommendations

Keep Branches Short-Lived

Regardless of workflow, branches that live longer than 2-3 days accumulate merge conflicts and increase risk. Break large features into small, mergeable increments. A branch with 50 changed files is harder to review and more likely to cause merge conflicts than 5 branches with 10 files each.

Protect Main

  • Require pull request reviews before merging.
  • Require CI checks (tests, linting, build) to pass before merging.
  • Prevent force pushes to main.
  • Require branches to be up-to-date with main before merging.

Commit Messages

Write descriptive commit messages. Use conventional commits (feat:, fix:, docs:, refactor:) for automated changelog generation and semantic versioning. A good commit message explains why the change was made, not just what changed.

Feature Flags + Trunk-Based Development

Feature flags are the companion practice to trunk-based development. They enable merging incomplete features to main without exposing them to users. The feature is developed behind a flag, tested in staging and with beta users, and then gradually rolled out. This eliminates the need for long-lived feature branches.

Conclusion

For SaaS products, trunk-based development or GitHub Flow with short-lived branches is the most efficient workflow. Use GitFlow only for products with formal release cycles. Regardless of workflow — keep branches short, protect main with CI checks and reviews, and consider feature flags for safe incremental delivery.

Optimizing your development workflow? Our team helps teams adopt efficient Git workflows and CI/CD practices.