Quotes About Development

Without automated testing, continuous integration is the fastest way to get a big pile of junk that never compiles or runs correctly.

In our world, Development and IT Operations are adversaries; testing and Infosec activities happen only at the end of a project, too late to correct any problems found; and almost any critical activity requires too much manual effort and too many handoffs, leaving us to always be waiting.

any improvement not made at the constraint is just an illusion, yes?

When people are trapped in this downward spiral for years, especially those who are downstream of Development, they often feel stuck in a system that pre-ordains failure and leaves them powerless to change the outcomes. This powerlessness is often followed by burnout, with the associated feelings of fatigue, cynicism, and even hopelessness and despair.

A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents are shown in the same work systems as development work, it will be obvious when ongoing incidents should halt other work, especially when we have a kanban board.

Instead of IT Operations doing manual work that comes from work tickets, it enables developer productivity through APIs and self-serviced platforms that create environments, test and deploy code, monitor and display production telemetry, and so forth.

Frequently, Development will take responsibility for responding to changes in the market, deploying features and changes into production as quickly as possible. IT Operations will take responsibility for providing customers with IT service that is stable, reliable, and secure, making it difficult or even impossible for anyone to introduce production changes that could jeopardize production. Configured this way, Development and IT Operations have diametrically opposed goals and incentives.

They start making a list: Every developer uses a common build environment. Every developer is supported by a continuous build and integration system. Everyone can run their code in production-like environments. Automated test suites are built to replace manual testing, liberating QA people to do higher value work. Architecture is decoupled to liberate feature teams, so developers can deliver value independently. All the data that teams need is put in easily consumed APIs

the architecture that our services operate within dictates how we test and deploy our code. This

However, for decades we have ended up with silos of information, where Development only creates logging events that are interesting to developers, and Operations only monitors whether the environments are up or down. As

Instead, code is only "done" when it has been fully tested and is operating in production as designed. (Note

When we have long deployment lead times, heroics are required at almost every stage of the value stream. We may discover that nothing works at the end of the project when we merge all the development team's changes together, resulting in code that no longer builds correctly or passes any of our tests. Fixing each problem requires days or weeks of investigation to determine who broke the code and how it can be fixed, and still results in poor customer outcomes.

By the 2000's, because of advances in technology and the adoption of Agile principles and practices, the time required to develop new functionality had dropped to weeks or months, but deploying into production would still require weeks or months, often with catastrophic outcomes.

technical debt' is what creates hardship, toil, and reduces the agility of our software engineers,

By doing this, Development and Operations may end up creating a shared work queue, instead of each silo using a different one (e.g., Development uses JIRA while Operations uses ServiceNow). A significant benefit of this is that when production incidents

For Phoenix, it takes us three or four weeks for new developers to get builds running on their machine, because we've never assembled the complete list of the gazillion things you need installed in order for it to compile and run. But now all we have to do is check out the virtual machine that Brent and team built, and they're all ready to go.

Traditional managers will often object to hiring engineers with generalist skill sets, arguing that they are more expensive and that 'I can hire two server administrators for every multi-skilled operations engineer.'" However, the business benefits of enabling faster flow are overwhelming. Furthermore, as Prugh notes, "[ I] nvesting in cross training is the right thing for [employees'] career growth, and makes everyone's work more fun.

The Phoenix Project is ultimately a book about transformation, and so it is incredibly gratifying to see it being used as an instrument to create transformations in real life as well.

what's the plural of 'developer'?" says Maxine. "A 'merge conflict.

we value improvement of our daily work more than daily work itself.

when projects are late, adding more developers not only decreases individual developer productivity but also decreases overall productivity.

little fish learn to be big fish in little ponds.

if we all want our developers to be productive, they need to be able to perform builds on Day One.

Testing is done in scarce integration test environments, which often require weeks to obtain and configure. The