{"id":13090,"date":"2015-12-12T20:23:20","date_gmt":"2015-12-13T01:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=13090"},"modified":"2015-12-12T20:23:20","modified_gmt":"2015-12-13T01:23:20","slug":"yahoos-engineers-move-to-coding-without-a-net","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/12\/yahoos-engineers-move-to-coding-without-a-net\/","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a Net"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tekla Perry<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>, Slashdot<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

What happens when you take away the quality assurance team in a software development operation? Fewer, not more errors, along with a vastly quicker development cycle.<\/p>\n

That, at least, has been the experience at Yahoo, according to Amotz Maimon, the company’s chief architect, and Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of science and technology. After some small changes in development processes in 2013, and a larger push from mid-2014 to the first quarter of 2015, software engineering at Yahoo underwent a sea change. The effort was part of a program Yahoo calls Warp Drive: a shift from batch releases of code to a system of continuous delivery. Software engineers at Yahoo are no longer permitted to hand off their completed code to another team for cross checking. Instead, the code goes live as-is; if it has problems, it will fail and shut down systems, directly affecting Yahoo’s customers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The article doesn’t say what they mean by “errors” or how they are being counted.<\/p>\n\n

chojeen<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Before the switch, our team (advertising pipeline on Hadoop) used the waterfall method with these gigantic, monolithic releases; we probably released a handful of times a year. Almost without exception, QA was done manually and was painfully slow. I started to automate a lot of the testing after I arrived, but believe you me when I say that it was a tall order.<\/p>\n

Soon after I moved into development, QA engineers without coding chops were let go, while the others were integrated into the development teams. The team switched over to agile, and a lot of effort was made to automate testing wherever possible. Despite some initial setbacks, we got down to a bi-weekly release cycle with better quality control than before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

reid<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I’m a programmer at Yahoo -- deploying multiple times a day to production, with the confidence your code will work, feels great.<\/p>

Manual (“batch-release”) deployments have been forbidden for over a year, which is a forcing function to change development process to allow deploying to production continuously multiple times a day. This requires robust test and deployment automation and for engineers to better understand what they build. It’s pretty nice overall!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\t\n

diivio<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Microsoft switched to this model a few months after Satya took over.<\/p>\n

For the majority of Microsoft teams it worked really well and showed the kinds of results mentioned in this yahoo article. Look at many of our iOS apps as an example.<\/p>\n

But for some parts of the Windows OS team apparently it didn’t work well (according to anonymous reports leaked online to major news outlets by some Windows team folks) and they say it caused bugs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

See also: Why Good QA Matters to Businesses<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tekla Perry (Hacker News, Slashdot): What happens when you take away the quality assurance team in a software development operation? Fewer, not more errors, along with a vastly quicker development cycle. That, at least, has been the experience at Yahoo, according to Amotz Maimon, the company’s chief architect, and Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[71,268,459],"class_list":["post-13090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-programming","tag-testing","tag-yahoo"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13091,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13090\/revisions\/13091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}