Here's a thread about speed in software. Also known as delivery velocity. Software teams often ask "what's the rush?" The initial impression of a desire for faster delivery is one of deadlines and time pressure...
...but the exact opposite turns out to be true of improved delivery velocity. Time pressure and deadlines are eliminated. This is because the cause of stress and time pressure turns out not to be how fast or slow software is being delivered at all...
...the real cause turns out to be work-in-progress size. Or, in other words, holding on to too many things for too long, before releasing...
...when teams actually sit down and look at how they're delivering software from the lens of, how can we get each change all the way through the pipe into production faster, an amazing thing happens...
...this pipeline optimization for a single change, works out to result in optimization in the large as well. Smaller batch size keeps the size of each integration to a manageable level, and everything runs more smoothly...
...and to top it off, developers become happier and more productive too. Because as they optimize their pipeline, they start to see all the waste they had in it. Examples include painful branch merges full of conflicts and all kinds of manual work that gets automated...
...I know of software teams who manually redo work that their dev tools already creates for them, like manually writing changelog entries for every release and using GitHub releases simultaneously...
...There is a lot of waste like that. Most of it is self-created. Like teammates who manually deploy into separate environments from each other, because they're afraid of integrating their changes together...because when they finally do, stuff breaks all the time...
...never realizing that if they were integrating together every day, they wouldn't create painful "integration train wrecks." But the lesson here is that delivery velocity goes hand in hand with reduced stress, lower bug count, and all kinds of other goods...
...even increased quality in the large. So I hope this thread helps some of you to think about the advantages of speeding up, and become less protective of time and quality. These aren't things that tradeoff against each other at the end of the day...
...speed, quality, and developer happiness all go hand in hand, and enhance each other.
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