Research-backed conclusions in software delivery
Decision-making in software delivery projects is often a matter of opinions and preferences motivated by personal past experiences. It’s quite rare when I see engineering decision-makers actively seek out objective research data to help them.
This article from Jonathan Hall highlights several interesting conclusions, each of which he states “is supported by one or more scientific studies on the topic of software delivery”:
- Teams that practice continuous delivery have consistently better business outcomes.
- Teams that don’t use GitFlow demonstrate higher performance.
- Teams that peer review each others code produce fewer defects.
- Teams that do TDD do not produce fewer defects.
- Teams that have developers write their own tests have better business outcomes than teams with strictly dedicated testers.
Given the context-sensitive nature of software delivery, it’s just not feasible to rigorously test many hypotheses, but at the same time having some relatively objective data available as an input can be highly valuable to help debias our decisions.
Paul Swail
Indie Cloud Consultant helping small teams learn and build with serverless.
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