How Fast is Too Fast to Push Out New Features

We like to push out new features fast. Very fast. On a typical day we might push out four updates of our software to production. Now, we don’t do continuous deployment but I’d like it if we did. Do we make mistakes? Yes. The great thing about our mistakes is that they are small, because we push the changes out in bite-sized chunks. With small mistakes come small issues that we can fix quickly. The more complex the change the more complex the fix.

We do a combination of code reviews, human testing, unit testing, functional testing, and continuous end user experience monitoring. This doesn’t catch everything but it catches the vast majority of issues and always ensures the core system works. We find that customers prefer fast product innovation with minor hiccups to much slower product innovation, and still have minor hiccups. To err is human, and we’re comfortable with that.

My recommendation is to move fast and build that into the core competency of the business. Startups win by staying closest to the customer and moving fast.

What else? What do you think about pushing out features fast?