Q: Your engineering org has 60 engineers working on a fintech platform using Gitflow. Feature branches stay open for 3 to 6 weeks, resulting in 'merge hell', painful weekend releases, and blocked deployments whenever a single feature in a release branch fails testing. The VP of Engineering mandates a shift to Trunk-Based Development with multiple daily deployments to production. You must architect the branching model, CI gates, and feature flagging strategy that enables continuous integration directly to `main` without releasing unfinished features to customers.

Replace `release/*` and `develop` branches with a single `main` trunk. Enforce branch policies requiring all branches to branch off `main`, live for under 24 hours, and contain fewer than 400 lines of changed code.

# Branching Lifecycle Comparison
Gitflow (Anti-pattern for High Velocity):
  main ───┬─────────────────────────────────────────── Merge Commit ─── Release v1.2
          └── develop ──┬───────────── Merge ─── develop ──┘
                        └── feature-foo (3 weeks stale)

Trunk-Based Development:
  main ───●──────●──────●──────●──────●──────●─── Continuous Deployments
          └── PR ┘      └── PR ┘      └── PR ┘    (Lifetime < 24 Hours, Flags Hide WIP)

Integrate an enterprise feature flag SDK (e.g., Unleash, LaunchDarkly, or OpenFeature). Wrap unfinished business logic in Boolean or contextual flag evaluations so new code safely deploys to production in a dormant ('dark launched') state.

// Node.js OpenFeature Example
const { OpenFeature } = require('@openfeature/server-sdk');

async function processPayment(user, order) {
  const client = OpenFeature.getClient();
  const isStripeV3Enabled = await client.getBooleanValue('stripe-v3-checkout', false, { userId: user.id });

  if (isStripeV3Enabled) {
    return executeStripeV3Payment(user, order);
  } else {
    return executeLegacyPayment(user, order);
  }
}

Because developers merge 15-20 times per day, CI pipelines must complete in under 5 minutes. Parallelize test suites using test-splitting runners, aggressively cache dependencies, and defer expensive end-to-end integration tests to post-merge staging environments.

Establish an automated lint rule and Jira automation tracking flag age. Require feature flags to be removed from the codebase within 14 days after reaching 100% rollout to prevent technical debt accumulation.