Pull requests are a symptom of low trust: here’s the fix
T*D is the new name for the Playbook trifecta: Test-Driven Development, Trunk-Based Development and Team-Focused Development, fused into one operating model.
Your team has probably spent more hours this year waiting on pull requests than it spent writing the code marooned inside them. Andrea Laforgia opens his March 2026 essay Stop Using Pull Requests with numbers from across the industry that count the cost. The piece is the most thorough reckoning I’ve seen of why the modern pull request workflow is mis-designed for the teams that use it. Go read it. Then come back here — because if you’re using the Delivery Playbook, Laforgia is describing the practice you already know. He just gives it a name. And I like it.1
That name is T*D — Test-Driven Development, Trunk-Based Development and Team-Focused Development, fused into one operating model. Hold on to it. We’ll come back to it.
Don’t break the flow
Chapter 2.8 Delivery processes & tools lays out what a well-wrought delivery pipeline does: ephemeral environments, test batteries, zero trust, release orchestration, observability, canary releases. The argument is t…
