Ship Show Ask at Lean Agile Edinburgh 2025

Put Trust back in your Software Branching Strategy with Ship/Show/Ask

Pull requests have become a bottleneck. Engineers waste hours waiting for code reviews or long builds, switching between branches or reworking changes.

We are wasting time with no measurable improvement in quality.

Ship/Show/Ask is a new software branching strategy that combines the features of Pull Requests with the ability to keep shipping changes.

In this session, we'll look at branching in a more inclusive, dynamic way to unlock impactful code reviews without creating bottlenecks.

1. Rouan Wilsenach
Ship/Show/Ask
A modern branching strategy
wartypig.co.uk
@rouanw [email protected]

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Chapter one
Where are we today?

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How can we work effectively on
one codebase at the same time?

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Spoiler:
this talk is really about trust

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There was a time in the short (but getting longer)
history of software when the answer was:
“see you later!”

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Agile & XP came along
talk more, work together and
put our changes together all the time

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The rise of the Pull Request

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We’ve gotten ourselves into a
bit of a mess…

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In 40% of teams:
> 14 hours for a PR to be picked up for review
> 18 hours for a PR to go from opened to merged
<1 merge per dev per week
https://linearb.io/resources/engineering-benchmarks
Data from 3.6M PRs across 2000 teams

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How did this happen?

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Fear:
security
compliance
breaking things

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Teams scale fast and people’s
context is low

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Remember when I said this is
about trust?

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What does this cost?

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Waiting time
Context switching
PR Bloat

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Review fatigue

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We’ve all reshaped our workflows
for reviews that mean nothing

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Back to TBD?

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The PR advantage no one talks about:
inclusivity through enabling asynchronous
workflows

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More flexible way of working.
Remote work.
Part time work.
Time zones.
People with family commitments.
People with accessibility requirements.

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The tech industry desperately
needs diversity

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Chapter two
A trust-based branching model

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Introducing
Ship/Show/Ask

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The person contributing each change makes a
call about how the change should be treated

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Ship

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Ship

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Show

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Show

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Ask

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Ask

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The rules:
Approval should not be a merge requirement
People get to merge their own Pull Requests
We use TBD techniques
Our branches should not live long

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Pull requests cannot replace
conversation

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Chapter three
What about you?

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You’re already using my
branching strategy!

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If you mostly ship…
Start showing to increase visibility
Have conversations next to the code
Include people

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If you mostly ask…
Start showing to release some pressure
Learn some TBD techniques
Work on building trust
Incentivise safe changes

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Balance
Trust
Familiarity
Experience
Regulation

43. Rouan Wilsenach
Ship/Show/Ask
A modern branching strategy
wartypig.co.uk
@rouanw [email protected]
https://martinfowler.com/articles/ship-show-ask.html