With the rapid development of high power ultrafast fiber lasers, divided-pulse amplification (DPA) technology has attracted extensive concerns. DPA can be implemented through birefringent crystals or freespace delay lines. By combining with the techniques of chirped pulse amplification, spatial beam splitting and photonic crystal fiber amplification, DPA can be applied to coherent beam combining and nonlinear compression in order to increase both the pulse energy and peak power of ultrafast fiber lasers. The research progress of DPA in ultrafast fiber lasers was reviewed. Different system structures of DPA in the applications of coherent beam combining were analyzed. The optimization and further development of DPA was also prospected.