Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has a thought-provoking quote that resonates strongly with the world of software engineering: “You need to set up and organize so that you can do as many experiments per unit of time as possible. If doing an experiment costs $100 million and takes three years, well, you’re not going to be able to do very much innovation.” Although this statement was made in the context of business, it holds implications for the development cycles in software engineering. The quote underscores the importance of streamlining processes, minimizing overhead, and fostering an environment that encourages frequent experimentation without prohibitive costs or excessive time constraints.

After joining a new team, I found that the the development cycle is painfully slow and fraught with challenges. Our ability to iterate and test effectively is hampered by the limited availability of alpha environments for verification purposes. This bottleneck is exacerbated by the infrastructure deployment process, which takes around 30 minutes for a single deployment. While the environment facilitates some level of integration testing, a significant portion of the testing procedures relies on manual verification. Consequently, even the most trivial code changes spanning just a few lines are all day endeavors as we navigate through the time-consuming account allocation, deployment process, and manual verification cycles. This inefficient workflow stands in stark contrast to Bezos’s philosophy of maximizing experimentation and innovation, potentially stifling our team’s innovation and productivity.

The sluggish code→test→debug→code→release cycle we currently endure means that delivering value to customers becomes an unnecessarily prolonged process. Many engineers have great changes they want to make, but don’t make them due to the cost-benefit of how long it takes to release the small improvements. Recognizing this pain point, I have been advocating for and implementing strategies to facilitate faster iteration cycles. One critical aspect is empowering developers to conduct more comprehensive testing locally on their development machines, reducing reliance on cloud environments and their associated deployment constraints. However, in the same vain, I have been working towards creating cloud environments that can be easily provisioned by any developer, ensuring accessibility to prod-like cloud environments for fast and easy testing.

The key takeaway from this post is a call to action: how can you empower yourself and your team to iterate more quickly? When setting up a new service or developing within an existing one, consciously examine opportunities to accelerate your personal delivery pipeline. Can you streamline local development processes to minimize friction and delays? Investing a few hours to optimize your rate of experimentation and testing locally can potentially save you countless hours down the line. Similarly, familiarizing yourself with testing practices in personal cloud environments that mirror production setups can be a game-changer. These incremental time savings, though just 5-10 minutes here and there, can compound over time, translating into days or weeks of reclaimed productivity over the course of a year. While implementing these infrastructure improvements may require an initial investment of time and resources, the long-term dividends they yield in terms of developer velocity and overall team productivity make them an invaluable endeavor. Embrace a mindset of continuous improvement and be proactive in identifying and addressing bottlenecks that hinder your ability to deliver value rapidly and efficiently.