How Progressive Delivery Helps You Learn from Failures

The text discusses the importance of embracing failures as a means for learning and improvement in production environments. It introduces Progressive Delivery, a technique used by companies like Target and IBM to control how features are released to users. This approach involves rolling out changes first to small, low-risk audiences and gradually expanding it to larger and riskier groups. By doing so, organizations can validate results as they progress, pause and correct when necessary, and gather feedback from users to improve release quality. Progressive Delivery consists of two parts: release progression and delegation. Release progression involves adjusting the number and types of users who see a new feature, while delegation gives control of turning a feature on or off to the group most closely responsible for its outcome. This approach helps organizations recover from failures by having processes in place to manage and control systems' behavior when things go wrong. Feature flags and observability tools are essential for this purpose, as they provide safety mechanisms to identify and recover from failure. In summary, Progressive Delivery is a valuable technique that enables organizations to safely deploy and release software while minimizing the impact of failures.