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Writing Production Software

„production“

The code (and the platform it runs on) that, if it stops working, means that your product stops working, and your business has a problem.

Who? Me?

Christian Schramm

Story: Paralysis by fear

Why even be afraid?

  • Development is change.

  • Change means things can break.

  • Production breakage can be really, really bad.

Fear-Free Software Development

Good production software is the result of a fear-free software development culture and process.

What not to do: Predicting know the future

You don’t control business requirements.

Story: The generic data converter for APIs

Don’t generalize the problem

Solve it. Abstraction is debt. Don’t generalize to procrastinate.

Example: Error handling

try:
    result = requests.get(url, raise_for_status=True)
except HTTPError as e:
    logging.error("request failed with status %s", e.status)
    raise

Don’t write error-handling code

The breakage you can anticipate is most likely not your problem.

Example: The good old code

if config.OLD_BEHAVIOUR:
    ...
else:
   ...

Don’t carry around old code or behavior

And don’t make runtime switches for behaviour change.

What to do

Make sure your deployment process is a joy

Because that’s where change is supposed to happen.

Story: Too many products

If it can fail, make it fail right now

Make it easy to reason about

That’s often more an issue of application design than code quality.

Example: Task restart

Make operations idempotent

It should not make a difference it you execute an operation once or more. Test it.

Example: State exchange between tasks

Design around state transparency

You should always be able to tell the exact state of your entire application, right now.

Summing up Fear-Free Software Development

  • Think about the future, but don’t try to predict it.

  • Strife to make the present code and application state easy to reason about.

  • Make sure changes (and failures) happen at deployment time.

Applying the principles of FFSD

  • get your team on board

  • Get your product owner on board

  • Integrate it into your agile process

  • Integrate it in your definition of done

Thanks!