I work on a massive monolith that has about 800 contributors and its just as complex to add something as simple as a user’s birthday, just not all the complexity is technological. It requires “organizational alignment” since you’re touching everyone’s code.
There will be endless iterations on design and review. Sign off required by at least 2 architects. It will get added to multiple planning iterations. The actual code will take an afternoon or less. We’ll have to ensure we hit out 90% test coverage during code review but because of all the tests, it’ll be too big for one PR so it will need to be broken up into multiple PRs probably landing over multiple weekly releases. To facilitate that, we’ll put it behind a feature flag (of which there are currently 13,000). Once it hits production, and the dashboards/monitoring are put in place, it will get enabled and disabled over and over again as we’re not totally sure why our birthdate feature broke the metering service, but we think that’s the root cause—need to do a few weeks of analysis.
Then, finally, in a year the engineer who was tasked with it will get a good performance rating, maybe be up for a promo! Just in time for him to jump into another project that’s failing horribly headed into its 3rd year in development: Allowing the user to set their timezone.
There will be endless iterations on design and review. Sign off required by at least 2 architects. It will get added to multiple planning iterations. The actual code will take an afternoon or less. We’ll have to ensure we hit out 90% test coverage during code review but because of all the tests, it’ll be too big for one PR so it will need to be broken up into multiple PRs probably landing over multiple weekly releases. To facilitate that, we’ll put it behind a feature flag (of which there are currently 13,000). Once it hits production, and the dashboards/monitoring are put in place, it will get enabled and disabled over and over again as we’re not totally sure why our birthdate feature broke the metering service, but we think that’s the root cause—need to do a few weeks of analysis.
Then, finally, in a year the engineer who was tasked with it will get a good performance rating, maybe be up for a promo! Just in time for him to jump into another project that’s failing horribly headed into its 3rd year in development: Allowing the user to set their timezone.