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by gmueckl 595 days ago
The actual need for continously delivery is mostly related to running public-facing services at large scale that need the ability to adjust to external events quickly, e.g. when defending against a new form of abuse requires an immediate software change.

Al other software could get away with deliberate release cycles rather than an urge to YOLO things into production. I just think that there is a fallacy in business leadership that ultra short turnaround times on features actually matter for a business.
1 comments
wbl 595 days ago
Until you have the feature in production you do not know if it works.
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gmueckl 595 days ago
Engineering is about making certain that stuff works before it enters production. If we claim to do software engineering, then that's just a simple part of doing our job. Everything else is just tinkering and hacking (the bad kind).
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ajb 595 days ago
From an engineering point of view, yes. But not from the business point of view.

It's like a restaurant. You can make sure they new dish tastes like what you intended and isn't going to poison anyone, but until it's on the menu you don't really know if people will want to eat it or if it will be a success for the business.

This does make me wonder whether there's a place for a system where you split your usebase into N shards, and only deploy new versions to one of them; reducing the update rate from a user perspective by a factor of N. Of course, this means you have to maintain compatibility with N versions, but that's still better than N feature flags.

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alextingle 595 days ago
That whole approach is so disrespectful of users. If you are a serious business, then hire sufficient QA people, and empower them to do their job.

Expecting your customers to do your QA for you is super common these days. But that doesn't make it right.

(What really infuriates me is the general lack of feedback channels that enable users to actually contribute to QA. With open source software, end users can at least open a ticket on the bug tracker. If it's a commercial product, all too often the only point of contact is a disempowered call-centre worker, who can't even log a bug for you.)

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wbl 595 days ago
QA has the disadvantage of knowing how it should work. Users are not so burdened and very creative.

It can decrease the chances but isn't a panecea.

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tightbookkeeper 592 days ago
how did they ship shrink wrapped software (including operating systems) that didn't even have the option for updating after the fact?
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