DevOps For Dummies



Chapter 12

Implementing Rapid Iteration

IN THIS CHAPTER

Failing fast (it’s not what you might think)

Prioritizing important work over false urgency

Increasing velocity through improved performance

The term fail fast became a mantra of startup culture in the early 2000s and became widely used thanks to the ubiquity of Eric Ries’s 2011 book, The Lean Startup. Facebook, one of the grand successes of Silicon Valley startups, even went so far as to make its motto “Move fast and break things” — in other words, fail fast. The fail fast mentality became popular in Silicon Valley because of its emphasis on quick innovation, something critical to companies looking to disrupt industries with novel innovations.

The original intent of the term fail fast was to encourage startups to build minimum viable products (MVPs) — small subsets of features designed to satisfy early adopters — to experiment, verify assumptions, and collect customer feedback before dedicating capital to large-scale projects. Innovation and iteration are tenets of DevOps, but failing too fast and too often can cause more problems than it solves.

For Facebook, this fact became ...