[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Trunk-based development is a source-control practice where developers integrate small changes into a single shared branch (trunk or main) at least once a day, using short-lived branches that live hours to a day rather than long-lived feature branches. Incomplete work ships hidden behind feature flags instead of accumulating on a side branch. The point is to avoid large, painful merges and keep the codebase in a continuously releasable state, which is why it is a prerequisite for continuous delivery. The DORA research (DORA Metrics) identifies it as one of the technical capabilities that predicts elite delivery performance: teams merging to trunk daily ship faster and more stably than teams running long-lived branches or GitFlow. It is Work-in-Progress Limits applied to version control, and it is the batch-size lever behind small pull requests. Seeded from DORA Metrics.