FrameThink: How Facebook Ships Code

Some interesting notes in this:

I'm fascinated by the way Facebook operates.  It's a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried).  These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and release software.

It's been over six months since I assembled these observations and I'm sure Facebook has continuously evolved its software development practices in the meantime.  So these notes are probably a little bit out-of-date.  It also seems like  Facebook's developer-driven culture is coming under greater public scrutiny.  So I'm feeling more comfortable now about releasing these notes…   HUGE thanks to the many folks who helped put together this view inside of Facebook!

During monthly cross-team meetings, the engineers are the ones who present progress reports.  product marketing and product management attend these meetings, but if they are particularly outspoken, there is actually feedback to the leadership that "product spoke too much at the last meeting."  they really want engineers to publicly own products and be the main point of contact for the things they built.

Arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by just spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users.

I wonder if this method really does scale well. I don’t think it would work everywhere. But, they do test. That’s amazing.

How many other organizations really do?

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