Architecture & practice·topic 7 of 10

Delivery, flow and technical debt

How work moves from someone's head to production, and what slows it down. The measurements here exist because 'we are moving slowly' is not actionable and 'a change takes nine days to reach production, of which eight are waiting' is.

Read in order · tick what you already know

01
everyone merged to main at least once a day, and the branch was never more than a few hours old.
Trunk-based development
02
you worked on a branch for three weeks and spent two days merging it.
Feature branch
03
the migration branch was six weeks old and the merge conflicts were in files neither change was about.
Long-lived branch
04
your change was merged and verified against everyone else's within the hour, not at the end of the sprint.
Continuous integration
05
every commit on main was releasable, and shipping was a decision rather than a project.
Continuous delivery
06
the merge went to production on its own and nobody pressed anything.
Continuous deployment
07
the release contained forty changes, something broke, and the first hour went on working out which one.
Batch size
08
you were told to finish one of the four things you had started before picking up a fifth.
Work-in-progress limit
09
the ticket was open for nine days and someone was actively working on it for six hours of that.
Flow efficiency
10
the request was made in March and reached customers in June, and the coding took four days.
Lead time
11
the work took four days once someone started it, and it had been sitting in the backlog since March.
Cycle time
12
the argument about whether the team was fast stopped once four numbers were on the wall.
DORA metrics
13
the team ships eleven times a day and the other one ships every second Thursday.
Deployment frequency
14
one deploy in six needed a fix or a rollback, and nobody had counted until someone asked.
Change failure rate
15
the outage started at 09:14 and traffic was healthy again at 09:31, and that number is the one that got tracked.
Mean time to restore
16
the security review happened while the design was still a document instead of the week before launch.
Shift left
17
the ticket was moved to done and the monitoring, the docs and the flag cleanup were still outstanding.
Definition of done
18
you did the same twenty-minute manual runbook every Tuesday for a year.
Toil
19
you shipped the quick version to make the date, wrote down what you skipped, and paid for it every sprint after.
Technical debt
20
someone finally separated the corners we cut on purpose from the ones we cut without noticing.
Debt quadrant