Agree/Disagree: You can only ship as fast as you can test?

1 dmitrycube 1 8/6/2025, 7:39:35 PM
I know some people don't test at all and some have their users test in Production. No judgement.

Assuming your teams test, Dev->Staging->Prod, local dev or ephemeral env's. What do you think the critical path is to help you go faster other than increasing raw Eng bandwidth:

- Write code more efficiently? - CI/CD pipelines - build/deploy faster? - Test earlier, test faster, test better?

Comments (1)

PaulHoule · 3h ago
See https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...

for a classic analysis. Software has numerous problems that are on the "critical" path, if you say that there are five things, let's just say

  -- requirements elicitation
  -- analysis
  -- implementation
  -- testing
  -- deployment
and each of these takes 20% of the work, you can see a product which eliminate just one phase of this work still leaves 80% of the work undone! So the answer is that to make a revolutionary change you have to speed up everything.

Deploy is interesting, for instance, in the cloud age in that you really could deploy with "just one click" into hosting provided by the vendor, but many organizations would want to be on premise or in the cloud they control which just vastly complicates it all, as every organization does it the "army way", not the right or wrong way. [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-a-thing-in-the-US-Army-to-say-Th...