The Agile Samurai

A Culture of Production Readiness

There is a saying in Extreme Programming that production starts on day one of the project. From the first day you write a line of code, you treat the project as if it were in production, and after that, you are merely making changes to a live system.

It’s a profound difference in how you view your code. Instead of viewing production and deployment as some event way off in the distant future, you imagine you and your team are in production today and start behaving accordingly.

Agilists like this notion of production readiness because it acknowledges that software spends a lot more time in production than development, and it gets the teams used to the idea of making changes to a production-ready system.