Comments by "Michael Stover" (@michaelrstover) on "Continuous Delivery Pipelines: How to Build Better Software Faster • Dave Farley • GOTO 2021" video.

  1. I think what a lot of people get stuck on with this concept of "going faster results in higher quality", is that there are multiple different ways to "go faster". When most people think about going faster, they are thinking of ways of going faster that do indeed result in poor quality software. They think, skip the tests! Don't waste time refactoring! Ship the prototype! These are ways to go faster. But, it's not what Dave means. What we mean by go faster is about picking each smallest bit of value we can safely deliver and doing it and getting it in front of customers and end users right away and then going on from there. We don't skip tests. We don't skip refactoring. We don't skip any concepts of good code design. But we do skip anything that isn't needed for that bit of value, and we don't skip anything that's important for that bit of value. If the bit of value degrades performance, then performance design was in fact needed, for example. But there's a big ol' BUT: picking the smallest bit of value, and delivering it right away, and recognizing what can be skipped and what cannot is HARD. In communicating about this, it doesn't help to gloss over that fact.
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