Balancing “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It” vs. “Release Early and Often”

Even if "it ain't broke," you can still improve it. Your customers will like it. Your competitors won't. Never stop challenging yourself.

As potential improvements pass through integration stages, subject them to automated tests with realistic synthetic workloads. And then, by the time they're production-ready, bugs should be fixed because they've passed through a gauntlet of high-quality testing.

I call this an innovation pipeline. Here is the vision.

• It starts with small innovation projects across the organization.

•   Most fail fast.  
•   •   make it into a first stage integration lab,

    •   where more fail fast.

• Survivors go to a QA lab,

•   where testing teams find and fix integration problems.

• Then they go to a pre-production lab,

•   where testing teams use realistic synthetic workloads to find and fix scale problems.

• And eventually into production,

•   all on a predictable schedule.