Operating in Another Gear

I had the privilege yesterday to hear from a release engineer at one of the largest internet properties in the world. The stats he shared were staggering. I thought I’d share a few with all of you to motivate you to look for ways to increase your velocity.

Here are some of the highlights:

• 7,000 commits per week
• 50-60,000 builds across all platforms per week
• Millions of automated tests per week
• Three releases per day
• No internal QA – Read that again. No. Internal. QA. All testing is done with users and is heavily instrumented to identify bugs in small test groups before general release.

You might say “Yeah, that’s them, but I’m just a small shop. I can run that hard, that fast, that automated.” He closed out the presentation by saying “And this is how we worked when it was three people working out of their apartment.”

In other words, it’s in their DNA. It’s not by accident that they’re as large as they are. They’ve figured out how to run fast and yet keep quality amazingly high. It can be done, and it starts on Day One.