Intuition: “Integrating more frequently causes more merge conflicts.”
Reality: It causes more occasions for potential merge conflicts, each one less likely to occur, easier to resolve, and cheaper to discard if necessary.
Intuition: “Frequently merging downstream (pulling main into feature branch) solves the problem of merge conflicts.”
Reality: It only resolves conflicts between main and the feature branch, but not between the different feature branches. It also potentially leads to conflicts between conflict resolutions, in case multiple developers had to resolve a conflict in the same area of the code on their respective branches.
Intuition: “Releasing more often causes more defects in production.”
Reality: It causes more frequent occasions for potential defects in production, with fewer defects per release (thus lower risk), each one being easier to diagnose and quicker to fix, and fixes being releasable without going around our standard quality process for releases.
Raimund Krämer 