This document discusses trunk-based development and strategies for avoiding issues that can arise from branching code. It notes that branches often lead to merge conflicts and integration problems. Several experts provide recommendations, such as hiding new functionality through abstraction, iterative development with small releasable changes, componentization, and continuous integration to keep the code always releasable. Branching may make sense for large changes, spikes (experiments that may be thrown away), or new releases, but the document questions when branching is truly needed. Overall it promotes trunk-based development with fewer branches to reduce integration headaches.