Rephrasing of the "protected trunk branch requiring passing builds" requirement?

[garry-jeromson]

Hullo! This project is awesome as a means to identify and track areas for improvement.

One thing that threw up a few questions in our teams is the Protected trunk branch requiring passing builds requirement in the Build on commit section. Questions included:

• "But doesn't that contradict Stop feature work when pipeline fails? How can the pipeline fail?"
• "So we should always work on feature branches?"
• "What about pushing directly to trunk?"

I wonder if there's a more nuanced way of phrasing this, that could reflect the fact that pushing directly to trunk is sometimes a legit way to go (depending on team maturity, trust, pipeline run costs, etc.)? If the pipeline runs commands that can be easily run locally by engineers, then local validation before pushing can give a similar level of confidence.

Curious on your thoughts, either way. Thanks for such a great resource!