Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

1.2. Why Is Production Readiness Important?

Failure is not an option. I can only assume that almost all projects start off with this stance. Most of the projects that I've worked on certainly have. The trouble is that a number of projects do fail or are seen to be a failure in the eyes of customers or stakeholders. The question is not "Why do they fail?" The ultimate question is "How do we succeed?" A cursory search on the Internet would yield an abundance of results on both these subjects. However, I'm not going to go into the statistics and findings of these studies. I'm going to provide my personal point of view on what I think are the main causes of failure and what I think are the key factors for success. To answer the second question "How do we succeed?" it is often necessary to examine your past mistakes, understand what went wrong, and put measures in place so that it doesn't happen again — which is just commonsense. In recent times, there have been some very newsworthy software outages, some of which have cost millions of dollars in lost revenues and crashing stock prices. Mission-critical systems can't sustain serious outages in live service. In some extreme circumstances, the outages have cost many high-ranking personnel their jobs and sometimes their careers. It is not always so bad, however. On the less extreme side, a project can be seen as a failure because of delays and budget overruns. A successful project is typically referred to as one that delivers all the ...