I would have loved more detail in the "The limited role of developers" (or maybe merits a separate follow up). On the one hand, this section feels so obviously right. On the other, roles like ops and QA evolved for reasons so curious in wrangling with this legacy product how that could've been better / different beyond just consolidating work / roles.
"The only thing left was to deploy it so that we could test it. This was a problem, of course – in this case, we were not the ones deploying it or testing it. Deploying had to be done by the ops team, and testing by the test team. Why couldn’t we, as developers, manage the whole feature from start to production instead of opening tickets and waiting for other teams before we could close our task?
Firstly, we couldn’t avoid manual testing since much of the code wasn’t covered with tests. We also couldn’t deploy the application ourselves since the infrastructure didn’t allow us to.
This had us thinking about the reasons behind the separation of duties and how our current approach is better. Seeing that our lead and cycle time on this project was significantly higher than usual (it took us weeks to deliver something we usually deliver in several days), the evidence was strongly in favor of that."
"The only thing left was to deploy it so that we could test it. This was a problem, of course – in this case, we were not the ones deploying it or testing it. Deploying had to be done by the ops team, and testing by the test team. Why couldn’t we, as developers, manage the whole feature from start to production instead of opening tickets and waiting for other teams before we could close our task?
Firstly, we couldn’t avoid manual testing since much of the code wasn’t covered with tests. We also couldn’t deploy the application ourselves since the infrastructure didn’t allow us to.
This had us thinking about the reasons behind the separation of duties and how our current approach is better. Seeing that our lead and cycle time on this project was significantly higher than usual (it took us weeks to deliver something we usually deliver in several days), the evidence was strongly in favor of that."