🚽 Change Management: The Real Reason Your Release Velocity Is in the Toilet

Welcome back, developrrrs! 👋 For today's issue, we're taking a deep dive into the dark side of change management - those labyrinthine approval processes that can turn a one-line fix into a bureaucratic nightmare. I'll share why these processes might be hurting more than helping, and offer practical strategies for finding the right balance between safety and speed.

— John Ciprian

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🤿 DEEP DIVE

🚽 Change Management: The Real Reason Your Release Velocity Is in the Toilet

I recently watched a brilliant engineer spend more time filling out a change management ticket than writing the actual code fix. The ticket required detailed descriptions of the change, impact analysis, rollback plans, three levels of approvals, and what felt like their firstborn child. By the time everything was approved, the original problem had spawned three new issues. The worst part? This wasn't an exception – it was their standard deployment process.

According to the State of Developer Experience 2024 report, 60% of organizations are still releasing code on a monthly or quarterly basis. I'd bet good money that excessive change management processes are a primary culprit behind those glacial release cycles. Those three-page change tickets aren't protecting your production environment – they're protecting you from actually improving it.

😱 The Developer Experience Nightmare

Change management tickets create a special kind of developer trauma. I once worked with a team where deploying even a single-line CSS fix required:

1. Creating a ticket with 14 required fields

2. Waiting for peer review (1-2 days)

3. Getting manager approval (another 1-2 days)

4. Receiving final approval from a staff engineer (who was inevitably on vacation)

5. Scheduling the deployment for the next maintenance window (which was never "now")

This isn't process – it's purgatory. The psychological impact is devastating. Developers stop making small improvements because "it's not worth the paperwork." They batch changes into massive, risky deployments because going through this gauntlet once a quarter is marginally better than doing it weekly. The feedback loop stretches from hours to weeks, disconnecting developers from the impact of their work.

✅ When Change Management Makes Sense (It's Rarer Than You Think)

Let's be clear: some environments genuinely need rigorous change controls. If you're handling financial transactions for millions of customers or running life-support systems, I want you to have thorough processes. But even NASA, who literally builds rockets, has found ways to move faster without compromising safety.

The problem isn't change management itself – it's change management applied indiscriminately as a one-size-fits-all solution. That marketing microsite doesn't need the same process as your payment gateway. That internal admin tool doesn't need the same scrutiny as your customer-facing API.

🛡️ The Safety Illusion

Here's the painful paradox: excessive change management often makes your systems LESS safe, not more. When deployments are rare, painful events:

1. Each deployment contains dozens or hundreds of changes, making it impossible to identify which change caused an issue

2. Developers lack practice with the deployment process, increasing the likelihood of mistakes

3. Recovery from failures takes longer because teams aren't used to responding quickly

4. The true state of production becomes a mystery as it drifts further from what's in version control

I've seen massive production incidents caused not by the absence of process, but by processes so cumbersome that teams created unofficial workarounds just to get their jobs done. Nothing says "security" quite like SSH access shared via Slack because the official process takes three days.

⚖️ Finding the Right Balance

Effective change management should be like good infrastructure – it should enable developers, not obstruct them. Here's how to strike that balance:

1. Risk-based approvals: Implement tiered approval paths based on the actual risk of the change. A typo fix doesn't need three approvals; a database schema change might.

2. Automated verification: Replace human checkbox-ticking with automated tests, static analysis, and deployment guardrails. A comprehensive CI/CD pipeline provides more consistent protection than any human reviewer.

3. Post-deployment verification: Shift from preventing deployments to verifying their success with robust monitoring, automated rollbacks, and feature flags.

4. Service classification: Categorize your services by their criticality and apply appropriate controls to each tier. Your payment processor needs more scrutiny than your blog.

5. Streamline documentation: Templates, smart defaults, and auto-filled fields can reduce the cognitive load of change tickets without sacrificing information quality.

One team I worked with reduced their change management overhead by 70% by implementing automated security checks and graduated approval processes. Their deployment frequency increased 5x while their incident rate actually decreased.

💡 The Bottom Line

Change management should protect your systems without handcuffing your developers. If your process makes simple changes take days, you're not being thorough – you're being counterproductive. Automate what can be automated, align approval processes with actual risk, and focus human attention where it truly adds value. Your goal should be confident, frequent deployments, not comprehensive documentation of why you never deploy.

Remember: The real threat isn't the change that follows your cumbersome process – it's all the valuable improvements that die in the backlog because no one wants to deal with your paperwork.

Stay agile! 🏃‍♂️

Powered by coffee ☕️ and the quiet rage of waiting for my third approval​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

📊 STAT

93% of respondents say platform engineering adoption is a step in the right direction.

Platform engineering is quickly becoming a key enabler for modern software delivery. Respondents cite its role in driving speed, security, and developer satisfaction across organizations, making it a strategic priority for many.

💡 Key Insight: Platform engineering isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential for staying competitive.

📌 ESSENTIAL READS

🚀 Lynx: Empowering Developers with Native UI Capabilities. Lynx introduces a suite of technologies enabling developers to utilize web skills for crafting native UIs across mobile and web platforms from a single codebase. Drawing inspiration from React Native’s 2015 innovation, Lynx enhances scalability and velocity in native app development. It supports familiar web development practices, allowing the use of standard markups and CSS for design, while promoting responsible main thread usage to maintain interactivity. By open-sourcing Lynx, the team aims to democratize cross-platform technologies, enriching the broader web community.

📄 Developers Hate Documentation—Especially AI-Generated Toil Work. A recent Stack Overflow survey reveals that developers struggle with documentation, particularly when AI-generated content is low quality or lacks clarity. While AI can speed up documentation efforts, it often leads to "toil work" that adds little value, frustrating developers who need accurate, concise, and well-maintained resources. The study emphasizes the importance of human oversight in documentation efforts, ensuring relevance and usability over mere quantity.

🚀 Nvidia-backed CoreWeave Acquires AI Platform Weights & Biases. CoreWeave, a cloud service provider supported by Nvidia, is set to acquire the AI developer platform Weights & Biases to enhance its cloud offerings ahead of a planned IPO. This acquisition aims to integrate CoreWeave's infrastructure with Weights & Biases' AI model training and monitoring tools, which are utilized by major tech companies like OpenAI and Meta.

🛠️ TOOLS

• Devbox is a lightweight, reproducible development environment manager that simplifies dependency management

• Moon is a build system and task runner optimized for monorepos, improving performance and scalability. 

• Zed is a collaborative, high-performance code editor built for speed and developer productivity.

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