If you ask the engineers at Facebook (I have), they are experts at continuously evolving their platform almost invisibly to the users. If you ask the users, Facebook is really fucking annoying because shit is breaking all the time and the button that was there yesterday is nowhere to be found.
Continuous Integration is a development practice that means that each little tweak to the software goes through the tests and then goes live. It’s a powerful idea, and can massively decrease the risk of publishing updates — rather than push out the work of several geek-years all at once, with all the risk of something going terribly wrong, you push out the result of a couple of geek-weeks of effort on a regular basis, taking baby-steps to the promised land. Tick, tick, tick, with an army of robots making sure no old bugs sneak back in again.
I fully embrace this idea.
Never has a company been more proud of accomplishing this than Facebook. They crow about it around here. Also, never has a company been so bad at actually doing it. What Facebook has managed to do is annoy users with endless changes that affect how people work, while still publishing bugs.
The key is that a continuous, minor set of tweaks to software is good, but endless tweaks to how people experience the software is bad. People don’t want to be constantly adjusting to improvements. So in continuous integration, you can enhance the user experience, but you can’t lightly take away something that was there before. You can’t move things around every couple of weeks.
Back in the day when I went on Facebook more frequently, I was constantly bemused by a user interface that felt like quicksand. Meanwhile, frequent users reported a never-ending stream of bugs.
Facebook, you are the champion of Continuous Integration, and the poster child for CI Gone Wrong.
