Engineering Decisions · Junior · Question 9 of 12
A big feature takes three weeks, while the team ships to production daily and conflicts are getting painful. How do you develop it?
- 1Keep a long-lived branch and merge it at the end
- 2Ship it as a separate app under a subdomain
- 3Merge small parts to main behind a feature flag
Show the answer
Correct answer: Merge small parts to main behind a feature flag
Explanation
Small merges behind a flag keep conflicts low while the unfinished work stays invisible to users. A long-lived branch fits a short task or a throwaway experiment, but over three weeks of daily releases it means a painful merge. A separate app fits a truly independent product, and for one feature it adds a deployment and duplicated setup.