The advent of SaaS, the adoption of CI/CD tools and the DevOps movement have enabled new features to be delivered to customers and bugs to be fixed at an unprecedented rate.

However, while these advances have reshaped the way software is developed and operates, bottlenecks remain. Developers are spending more and more of their time on non-code-related tasks. So a new challenge arises: how to free up time for developers and improve their DX?

Part of the answer could lie in merge queues, a concept as recent as it is little-known.

But before explaining what it is, we need to understand the practices that led us to this merge queue. We'll briefly retrace the history of development processes the world has known, to arrive at the state of the art we know today, namely continuous integration and deployment. The aim is to understand where we are today, in order to better understand where we're going.

What will tomorrow's development processes be like? What does a development team need to put in place today to ensure that a project is as successful as possible?