Fast and Agile
Via Greg Linden, I found an article on Extreme Agility at Facebook, which was pretty interesting because it addresses a problem I’ve run into at every single company I’ve worked at: there’s never enough testers.
Microsoft is known for having a high tester:developer ratio; something at or above 1:1. Most companies can’t or don’t want to pay the extra salaries, so developers need to shoulder more of the testing burden. Coupled with long release cycles, and this means that developers simply can’t afford to make mistakes.
The irony is that Agile is supposed to be faster than waterfall-style development. I think that it’s been proven that the iterate and improve model works for development, but the model falls down if you run into a wall on release and deployment; the whole model needs to be iterative. It does the organization no good if developers can’t get their work to customers. The sticking point is quality: you don’t want developers releasing broken code.
The key with Facebook seems to be peer review to make up for the lack of testers. The FB architecture probably has a lot to do with it, too. I don’t know a great deal about how FB is put together, but it seems like a pretty decoupled and asynchronous system, along the lines of Amazon. I’d love to see something more in depth about how FB actually makes all this work, and more importantly, what this does to the work environment. Is the environment stressful for a developer? Is deployment a routine event or a thing to be feared?
— Gordon Weakliem
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