I’ve been reading and re-reading The Goal (book) lately. The Goal is a book about the operational management of a factory. Originally published in 1984, it’s set before the Internet.
In the book, Alex Rogo (the factory manager) works to understand how to improve his factory. Alex is coached by Jonah, who early on presents a theory for production:
I added continuous integration to mikrobloggeriet.no. I decided to run tests both with Github actions and in the Dockerfile build of the application. And I was reflecting on the cost of doing that. Test dependencies for normal builds, and test dependencies in the tests. We need test dependencies in the tests, that can’t be avoided. But not necessarily in the Docker builds themselves. Locally, I added five to ten seconds to the builds by running tests.
Perhaps ten seconds is okay. But each dependency has a cost. Those ten seconds are subtracted every time we want to deploy from now on. That means it’s harder to fix issues.
This goes for every dependency that is added. Each dependency has a weight. You have to carry it from now on. You have to handle any issues it causes, you have to accept the increase in build times, and each new local setup will be slower.
“The Goal” from The Goal (book) is to increase throughput while simultaneously decreasing inventory and operational expense. Our “test before deploy” (CICD) strategy increases operational expense (more code, more dependencies). But it also enables us to increase throughput and decrease inventory. We increase throughput by spending less time debugging when something goes wrong that the tests could have catched. We decrease inventory by shipping smaller increments of code to production, where those increments can be tested.