Trunk-Based Development in Open Source Software Projects (Bachelor’s Thesis Summary)

Trunk-Based Development (TBD) is promoted as a practice for reducing integration overhead and improving software delivery performance. Yet little is known about how TBD principles manifest in open source software (OSS) projects, which operate in decentralized, asynchronous settings with minimal formal enforcement. This thesis investigates how TBD is interpreted and operationalized in the OSS context through a twofold approach. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of TBD and an exploratory review of contribution guidelines from diverse projects, revealing ambiguity in definitions and motivating a data-driven perspective. Second, it introduces a scalable data retrieval architecture that combines GitHub’s GraphQL API for collecting repository and pull request data with a custom Apache Beam pipeline over GHArchive to reconstruct branch lifecycle events. From over 220,000 repositories, a sample of about 50,000 is filtered and ranked using a quality-based scoring scheme, providing an empirical foundation for studying TBD-related branching and review practices at scale.