title: Is there a way to develop/release features 'when ready' without using version-control branches?
body: <p>My team has been using Continuous Integration for a while now, using the 'everything goes in trunk' approach. We're investigating changing this practice to allow us to release individual features as soon as they are ready, without having to wait for other features to catch up (we have multiple teams working on different features at once). There are lots of examples on how to do this with branching strategies (branch per feature etc), using git and the like, and that's probably my preferred approach. But we've been asked by the managers to at least investigate other options, because the worry is that a branching strategy could result in delayed integration points, which we want to avoid. I don't want this to get into a discussion on CI/branchging strategy though, so I'll try and be specific in my question.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone used any strategies for releasing features when ready, without running multiple version-control branches? For example, using <a href="http://paulhammant.com/blog/branch_by_abstraction.html" rel="nofollow">Branching by Abstraction</a> or some other means of having features with different states of 'readiness' in a single branch. If anyone has experience (good or bad) with this kind of approach I'd love to know.</p>