“Can we release this feature?” is usually a question answered by humans, not machines. From what I have seen around, even teams that practice continuous deployment seem to take a step back to consider whether they are ready to expose new functionality to their users. My impression is that “release decision” time might vary from a couple of hours to days or longer. Surely, a stable, meaningful deployment pipeline and a team’s certain autonomy level are prerequisites to take a decision. But I was wondering, what other activities might influence such a decision and how we could reduce their time span?

Here is a list of the things I came up with.

Read More »

Have you ever been in a conversation where somebody ends an argument with something like “But as we all know this will never work because of Conway’s Law”? And even worse, have you found yourself thoughtfully nodding even though you are not 100% sure what Conway’s Law exactly says?

I for one admit to have been in such a situation so I thought of noting down some of the laws, principles, theories or what have you, I often hear referenced in software development discussions. I included only the definitions and leave it up to the readers to look deeper into each one of them.

Read More »