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Production Problems Kill Confidence in Development Teams
It’s not if problems will occur but where you find them and how fast you fix them
It takes months and years for a development team to build confidence and an excellent reputation. One production issue can ruin this. If you think about that, you will create software differently.
You can prepare for mistakes, problems, and failures or you hope they don't happen. Hope on software projects is soon tested and won’t help you fix inevitable problems.
Developers can do a good job 90 percent of the time, but it's the 10 percent of problems, mistakes, and failures that everyone remembers. Failure in production ruins the development team's reputation.
Creating software is a collaboration between the development team (technical experts) and business experts (users). It’s built on trust, honesty, and respect. Production problems drain confidence in the development team and make the process harder.
Perception is reality
If the development team suffers problems and struggles to resolve them, the perception will be the development team is not doing good a job. You cannot control problems from occurring, you can control your response and how you present those problems.
Mistakes, problems, failures are unavoidable, no development team can stop them all. Development is a loser's game. The development teams that minimise mistakes and avoid production problems are doing a good job.
You cannot control problems but you can prepare for them and plan how to recover quickly with minimum disruption.
Production versus nonproduction problems
Obvious fact — production problems are 100 times worse than problems found in nonproduction.
Development teams prioritise stopping problems from occurring in production by finding them in nonproduction environments.
The best practices of source control, testing, ALM/DevOps, signing off requirements, documentation, etc. Find problems when they matter least, with more time to fix, and are easiest to fix.
