[JasonPunyon]

Long time dev at the company here.

Yes, Yes, and No.

#1 kind of happens naturally as we're all working on different things. There are "a lot" (< 100) of people slinging code/design/SRE/IT, but only a few work in the same areas at the same time and rapid good communication generally happens among those subsets of the overall team. We also seem to have perpetuated a tendency toward good citizenship, so we generally talk to people before traipsing through areas of the code we aren't familiar with.

#2 Absolutely. This is some basic principle stuff. We don't hire people to not trust them.

#3 Related to #2: Automated acceptance testing is done as is deemed appropriate by the person developing the system. I've been on teams that valued and developed automated testing more, and less. My personal experience at the company has been it is neither necessary nor sufficient for success.

Much more important than any pre-deploy automated testing is our effort to monitor what's deployed (both in terms of software/hardware metrics and business goals). Bosun (http://bosun.org), developed by our SRE team, gives us some pretty great introspection/alerting abilities. I'd be incredibly sad to not have it. Bosun monitoring combined with the ability to have a build out in <5 minutes keeps me pretty happy.

[pmelendez]

Just out of curiosity... you guys seems very pragmatical in most of things. Are you using any development methodology/principles (Agile, waterfall, etc.)?

[JasonPunyon]

Again, up to the individual teams to decide what's right for them. The most globally applicable principle we have is "Make sure to use your brain."

Currently most teams don't subscribe to a particular methodology, though there is a Scrum effort happening on one team.