Re:Shipping is your company’s heartbeat (2013)
by wpietri on Sunday September 24, 2017 @04:08PM
(#15326280)
Continuous deployment works differently. Your approach focuses on reducing MTBF; continuous deployment focused on reducing MTTR.
For CD to work, you can't really depend on QA for regression testing. You need to have really good automated test suites. You still do want exploratory QA, but that doesn't have to happen before release.
Code review works similarly. As your quote says, he did proper code review. It was a very small change, so it doesn't take long. Strong test coverage means code review is less about finding possible bugs and more about design issues. There's no urgency to getting those before release; people can watch changelogs just as well as they can service a review queue. And with frequent releases, developers return to important code often, meaning that design improvements happen over time.
For CD to work, you can't really depend on QA for regression testing. You need to have really good automated test suites. You still do want exploratory QA, but that doesn't have to happen before release.
Code review works similarly. As your quote says, he did proper code review. It was a very small change, so it doesn't take long. Strong test coverage means code review is less about finding possible bugs and more about design issues. There's no urgency to getting those before release; people can watch changelogs just as well as they can service a review queue. And with frequent releases, developers return to important code often, meaning that design improvements happen over time.