The development pipeline is a production system
This article argues that software development pipelines should be treated with the same urgency and maintenance standards as customer-facing production systems. When build systems or QA environments fail, the entire development team's ability to deliver value is halted, constituting a critical outage.
Why it matters
It advocates for a shift in engineering culture that prioritizes internal infrastructure reliability to prevent costly bottlenecks in software delivery.
Software developers learn early in their careers that nothing is more urgent than fixing a production outage. Drop everything! All hands on deck!
However, the same level of urgency is not often given to problems with our development tools, build systems, QA environments, and other parts of the software development pipeline. But for the development team, the development pipeline is a production system .
A software developer’s job is to deliver value for the company. Sometimes that means building new features, sometimes that means fixing critical bugs for the customers’ production systems. But none of this can happen when something is broken in the software development pipeline.
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