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by nevinera 969 days ago
Hm. I think maybe you're using "system" to mean a different thing than I am? I thinking of "the system" as the thing that is executing in production - it provides the business behavior we are trying to provide; there is a larger "system" surrounding it, that includes the processes and engineers, and the CI/CD pipelines - it too has an "architecture", and _that_ architecture gets (moderately) more complex when you add CI/CD. Is that where our communication is clashing?

Because the complexity of that outer system is also important, but there are a few very major differences between the two that are probably too obvious to belabor. But in general, architectural complexity in the inner system costs a lot more than it does in the outer system, because it's both higher churn (development practices change much slower than most products) and higher risk (taking production systems offline is much less permissible than freezing deployments)
1 comments
marcosdumay 969 days ago
> I think maybe you're using "system" to mean a different thing than I am?

No, I'm not. Are you overlooking some of the impacts of your tests and most of the impact of static verification?

Those do absolutely impact your system, not only your environment. For tests it's good to keep those impacts at a minimum (for static verification you want to maximize them), but they still have some.

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nevinera 969 days ago
I don't think I'm overlooking any major ones, but we are probably working in quite different types of systems - I'm not aware of any type of static verification I'd use in a rails application that would affect _architecture_ in a meaningful way (unless I would write quite terrifying code without the verifier I suppose).

I'm not sure about the tests - it depends on what you'd consider an impact possibly; I've been trained by my context to design code to be decomposable in a way that _is_ easily testable, but I'm not sure that is really an 'impact of the tests' (and I'm fairly confident that it makes the abstractions less complex instead of more).

Would you mind explaining what you mean in more detail?

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