Organizations face validation challenges despite strong deployment capabilities

Deployment Capabilities Demonstrated

Tech teams commonly showcase their sophisticated deployment methods, such as progressive rollouts and feature flags. They highlight capabilities like one-command rollbacks and a decade's worth of investment in delivery tooling.

Reality of Change Shipping

Despite these tools, many teams do not deploy changes individually. Instead, they merge multiple changes into a shared branch, waiting for a release manager to oversee batch rollouts. This practice raises risks of unforeseen interactions between changes.

The Role of Validation

The central issue is not the ability to deploy changes but rather to validate them. While the mechanical aspect of deploying a single change can be managed, the challenge lies in establishing confidence in that change's behavior independently of the complete system.

Trusting Changes—A Key Barrier

Organizations often lack the capacity to trust individual changes, resulting in a preference for bulk shipping. A reliance on a 'release train' system indicates insufficient confidence in isolated changes, suggesting a need for improvement in validation processes.