The State of Feature Releases from Microsoft using CI/CD

There has recently been a push at my workplace to incorporate principles of CI/CD into our product release cycle. Some of these principles have had a positive effect on how we develop our products and I have been investigating other aspects for their merits. In particular, the Continuous Development idea of Trunk-based Workflows has been intriguing, if only because it has the potential to have a rather negative impact on the outgoing quality if not administered correctly.

I mention this because I have been listening to the most recent episode of the Windows Weekly podcast and it has struck me as interesting to relate the news items in the podcast with the problems that could be caused but trunk-based workflows. Any time Paul feels the need to rant, it feels like it’s about something that was caused by developers adding all the code to the core branch of the product and switching it off with a feature flag. I wasn’t much of a proponent of this style, but I was prepared to consider it given the championing by large companies such as Microsoft, but the continued trips I’m hearing about from the podcast over recent years only cement with me that this is not a positive step for the industry.

I type this knowing I’m not an evangelist, leader or influencer in this field and would like to to be convinced I’m imagining things or that my fears are reflected among my peers here.