Facing risk by instrumenting the hell out of it:
Software development is a complex system existing as it does at the intersection of people, systems, good intentions, confused and changing goals, and overly literal state machines. Past behavior isn’t always an indication of future behavior, and humans are terrible at reasoning about complex systems. As such we’re unlikely to know or have good visibility into whether we’ve reached a steady state and our hypotheses are likely to be wrong. In this uncertain and complex environment we initiate change only when the cost of not making a change overcomes the fear of making it.First in a series on how Etsy writes, deploys, and operates changing software without The Fear. Thanks for writing this stuff down, Kellan!
