What helps you ship confidently?

I've been thinking about this as I take lead on a project that needs help. What are the prerequisites we have to ensure 🤔

Right now we have Code That Works. We know it works because the business keeps running. But it's brittle and hard to work with. Sneeze wrong and you might break everything. I've gotten close.

One time all my code stopped working from one change to the next. Like broken no response stopped working. Then next morning the same code was fine. I never quite figured out what was wrong. Must've been the gremlins ...

Here's what I've come up with so far:

observability so we can investigate and debug production issues
alerting so we know quickly when a major fire breaks out in production
good DORA metrics so inevitable failures are quick to recover from
type safety so we can move code around and refactor things
modularization so we can reduce architectural complexity, increase ownership, and isolate failures
canary deploys so we can ship new features to a subset of users first

You'll notice I didn't say tests.

That's because in 15 years of writing production code I've never seen a test catch a bug that engineers didn't expect to happen. But observability and canary deploys have saved my ass on countless occasions.

Not sure though if DORA metrics (deploy frequency, lead time to changes, change failure rate, time to fix) are leading or trailing indicators. 🤔

What have you found helps you ship with confidence [name|]? Hit reply

Cheers,
~Swizec