I recently needed to merge a code change. I wasn’t a code owner of the specific repo, so I put my merge request in front of the code owners. It was a small lexical change, based on the current behaviour, but pointing at a new name for a resource.
The code owners were largely absent, but one remained contactable. He wasn’t happy to merge the code and was looking for approval from additional parties.
He was concerned that if we deployed this to production and it went wrong, there would be consequences for him personally. He’d lose his job.
He wouldn’t have lost his job.
He didn’t have the confidence or the trust to decide to make the change.
Which begs a whole world of questions:
- Why can I not make the change myself? Why do I need others to approve it?
- Why is one of the approvers not confident enough to approve the change without others?
- Who are the others, and why are they not on the approvers’ list?
- Why don’t we trust our pipelines to prevent the worst errors, and rescue us from danger with reverts?
- Why don’t we trust ourselves to make decisions that concern our own work?
- Do we give people responsibility without giving them empowerment to carry that out?
So many questions.
Here’s the thing. If you think that a CAB can somehow validate a software change in a cloud native infrastructure-as-code with pipelines world, then you’re probably mistaken. If you need a CAB to tell you that your deploy is valid, then you don’t have the right sort of setup.
If you’re too weak to release software on a Friday, you’re too weak to release it at all, and need to sharpen up the tools you’re using to fix that.
If you’re in a position of authority and you’re frightened of being fired for executing that authority, then you need to change your role, because it’s not working!
Just push the ****ing button and get the software delivered.
The only reasons not to deploy software:
- The change is out of scope of the project
- Some tests or other pipeline checks have failed
- The team is not on board with this change
Doing the right thing should not involve taking a begging bowl to some committees.
The Coding Craftsman 