After a couple of decades in the Danish software industry I've come to accept that there is only trunk-based development (COME AT ME!). Feature branches, set releases and so on are fake safety gaps that people add when they don't trust themselves and/or their developers. These days I view it similar to someone who won't deploy changes on fridays because they fear for their weekend. If you're too afraid to deploy on a friday, then you should not be allowed to deploy on a monday. Similarily, if you're not brave enough to push changes to production, then your changes aren't ready.
Of course I don't actually think there is a religion on how to do these things, but I've never seen any particular quality added by people doing quarterly releases from a feature branch. For the most part I think this part at the very beginning of the article explains a lot of the reason as to why that is:
> When we do trunk-based development, the WIP we commit gets used, before any actual user sees it, by our whole team.
In my eyes all of it comes down to management much more than deployment strategies. The disadvantage of feature branching is that it's very easy for management to cut costs on testing. The disadvantage of trunk-based development is that it requires functional teams of people who can actually work together and accept the "norms".
Of course I don't actually think there is a religion on how to do these things, but I've never seen any particular quality added by people doing quarterly releases from a feature branch. For the most part I think this part at the very beginning of the article explains a lot of the reason as to why that is:
> When we do trunk-based development, the WIP we commit gets used, before any actual user sees it, by our whole team.
In my eyes all of it comes down to management much more than deployment strategies. The disadvantage of feature branching is that it's very easy for management to cut costs on testing. The disadvantage of trunk-based development is that it requires functional teams of people who can actually work together and accept the "norms".