Branch by Abstraction is an advanced technique you can use to safely perform long-term refactorings on your codebase without losing the ability to ship your project.

Most teams would use branches in such cases. However, these come with their distinct disadvantages.

In this talk I want to show you why I try to avoid branches for long-term refactoring and demonstrate "Branch by Abstraction" as a safer and more flexible alternative to what is commonly used today. With this approach, you will not lose your ability to ship or to work on other things in your codebase.

background knowledge: you should be able to read Java to follow the code examples and be familiar with the basics of object-oriented programming.