I twice worked in a teams where we did not use branches (or PRs). Both were working like that when I joined them.
The first was because we were svn (and maybe even csv before that, but I cannot remember) and that did not support branching easily. That team did switch to git, which did not go with its some struggles, and misconceptions, such as: "Never use rebase."
The second team was already working without branches and releasing a new version of the tool (the Bond3D Slicer for 3D printing) every night. It worked very well. Often we were able to implement and release new features within two or three days allowing the users to continue with their experiments.
When after some years the organization implemented more 'quality assurance' they demanded that we would make monthly releases that were formally tested by the users, we created branches for each release. The idea was that some of the users would test the releases before they were official released, but that testing would often take more than a month, one time even three months, because they were 'too busy' to do the formal review. But at the same time some users were using the daily builds because these builds had the features implemented that they needed. As a result of this, the quality did not improve and a lot of time was wasted, although the formal quality assurance, dictated by some ISO standard, was assured.
I have no experience with moving away from using branches. It might be a good idea to point your manager/team lead/scrum master to dora.dev or the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ModernSoftwareEngineeringYT
Yes! This is something that I also value. Having demo gifs of before and after helps a lot. I have encountered situations where what I thought was a minor finishing clean up had an effect that I didn't anticipate. By including demos in the PR it becomes a kind of guardrail against those situations for me. I also think it is neat and generally helpful for everyone.
If you write your tests the Test-Driven Development way in that they first fail before production changes are introduced, you will be able to trust them a lot more. Especially if they are well-written tests that test behavior or contracts, not implementation details. I find that dependency injection helps a lot with this. I try to avoid mocking and complex dependencies as much as possible. This also allows me to easily refactor the code without having to worry about breaking anything if all the tests still pass.
When it comes to agentic coding. I created an open source tool that enforces those practices. The agent gets blocked by a hook if it tries to do anything that violates those principles. I think it helps a lot if I may say so myself.
I don't know but it's something really ought to be implemented by the agents. Is there an agent plugin standard? Mcp doesn't do enforcement like yours does it?
