MAD Trunk Based Development - A case study

Come join us for the first meetup in 2026 🤩🥪
We’ll have both an interesting talk and time for sandwiches.

This time, Martin Mortensen will show that trunk-based development works, even at its most minimal, stripped-off process. And he brings the data to back it up, as well as simple methods that make TBD work and the subtle nudging effects that happen.

He has conducted a survey of a team's experience with using Main-as-Default Trunk-Based Development with non-blocking reviews. What he found is that teams don't need to adopt TDD, pair programming, or other similar QA-defensive mechanisms to adopt Trunk-Based Development. Instead, reducing friction, getting early feedback, and delivering in small increments seems to create quality and robustness in itself.

Here you can find an article about the subject and here you can see a short video by Dave Farley about the survey.
Martin Mortensen:
All-over-the-place Software Developer, Delivery Efficiency Enthusiast, Toy Maker, working in Energy Trading Software.
Martin Mortensen has been a software developer and architect for a couple of decades.
Martin has had the opportunity to introduce and work with trunk-based development on several different teams in different organizations, within different domains, over the last 10 years.
He has written several articles about improving software delivery performance on teams, in organizations, and as individuals.