"Our customers prefer the product works over getting a new feature, so let's ensure that at any cost"
Number of features is a dial. You turn that down. You turn the operations (devops) dial up.
There is nothing modern about releasing half arsed shit... we been doing it since the dawn of civilization.
Because that doesn't work soon you keep adding layers upon layers to reduce the risk and your time to delivery suffers.
All knobs have consequences and long term they can really compound. The balance of picking quality over features isn't something I've seen done amazing. I'd like to work somewhere that could pull it off.
1. Think
2. Know what is going on.
3. Effectively get the best from their people.
You want the whole org to engineer the right solution
Any metric that gets abused needs to be found and replaced. Companies should use metrics and be very respectful, curious and also suspicious of them. Even revenue!
I know companies that leave revenue on the table for strategy.
Finally quality is about probabilities. That test you wrote that takes 12s to run and flakes 0.1% adding 10 hours of build time a year ... what is the probability of it detecting a bug and what would the cost of that bug be. You need every engineer to think of that stuff. It is hard stuff to get right or even good.
I worked at places where a religion almost builds. People are hired to maintain those slow expensive unreliable tests! You want to improve that you now have politics!
Do they, though? If a competitor launches a feature that all your customers want and start to switch to benefit from it, what are you going to do? Show burn-down charts of your bug backlog?
I would say this is not that common in SaaS. In that features are important but PMF is key. A feature that drags people over is really a new product. I can't think of an example of the bolt-on killer feature. And by the time you are big enough to run multiple distinct products youd better have good uptime. If you are a startup of course you need features but again finding PMF so you ain't worried about competitors. As a startup you are choosing boring tech and maybe a PaaS to help you do less productioning.
Notice the popularity of k8s, splunk, CI/CD, testing, multi region and so on? Yeah there is big money in being available.
But isn't that a post-facto observation? I mean, any project can work on a complex feature that's a flop, but sometimes a simple feature can go a long way and just tilt the scale. That's not a new product.
Not really. This is the fact of real world software development: your resources are limited, and either you invest them creating value for customers so that they choose your product over your competitor's or they choose your competitor's instead.
If you spend your resources on technical debt and clearing bug backlogs even of obscure nonblocking bugs, you're just spending your resources to offer your users more of the same. If you instead use your resources to deliver new features that might have a nonblocking bug here or there, you're improving your position over the competitor's.
Time to market matters. A lot. There is no such thing as time to empty backlog.
