devops_wiki:the_five_ideals [Owlbear Consulting

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====== The Five Ideals ======

The Five Ideals summarized from the book "The Unicorn Project".

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====== Locality and Simplicity ======

  * Development teams should be able to make changes to their code base and deploy, without impacting or coordinating with others.
  * Decouple applications and create abstractions to achieve locality.
  * Simplify code bases through abstractions as well.
    * The easier the code is to reason about, the easier changes are, and the less it breaks.

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====== Focus, Flow, Joy ======

  * Remove distractions, dependencies, and other road blocks that prevent developers from doing development work.
  * With the above removed, developers will be able to focus and enjoy the work, producing better code.

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====== Improvement of Daily Work ======

  * Build time into projects/schedules to allow teams to address technical debt and architecture.
    * These are the brittle things that break in an application/architecture first.
  * Improve anything that impedes a developer from coding.

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====== Psychological Safety ======

  * Teams should be able to talk about bugs/problems in an application or architecture, without blame/backlash.
  * Blame-less postmortems after a production down event or major bug are critical to implementing actual fixes and preventing the same thing from happening.
    * This should be a learning experience for everyone, not a blame session. 

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====== Customer Focus ======

  * Core focus - everything a customer is willing to pay for.
    * Example: Web services, APIs, databases, storage.
  * Context focus - everything else.
    * Example: Any system that supports employees. (such as HR systems)
  * While context is important, don't let it take over focus from core customer concerns.

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