Comparison
Cargo cultvsSurvivorship bias
Cargo cult
the team adopted the whole process from a conference talk without the constraints that made it work there.
Copying the visible practices of a successful team without the conditions that made those practices effective. It shows up as microservices at ten engineers, a review process from a company of thousands, or a testing pyramid nobody can explain. The diagnostic question is why this works here, and a copied answer that cannot survive it is ritual rather than engineering.
Full entry →Survivorship bias
you copied the architecture of a company that succeeded, and never saw the twenty that did the same and folded.
Drawing conclusions from the examples that made it into view while the failures are invisible. It is endemic in architecture discussion, where the public write-ups come almost exclusively from companies that survived, and where their scale was the result of success rather than the cause of it. The correction is to ask what the counter-examples would have looked like and whether you would ever have heard of them.
Full entry →