Enable Execution

Give teams the infrastructure, standards, skills, and planning needed to deliver.

Principles

• Every engineer owns quality.
• Build the runway to land the plane.
• Fail fast by reducing uncertainty.
• Do what’s right for the end customer.

In practice

Our mobile QA team had thousands of regression tests, but time to run only a few hundred before infrequent releases. We reduced the amount of change in each release, invested in automated tests on every build, and adopted trunk-based development with feature flags. This separated routine biweekly software releases from the decision to enable new features and freed QA to focus on harder-to-automate scenarios.

Faster bug resolution also helped bring the open backlog from hundreds to around 25. Read the engineering organizations case study.

Further writing

• Build the Runway to Land the Plane (planned article)
• Every Engineer Owns Quality (planned article)