- Migrations are essential, and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows.
- Most tools/processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective.
- Rapid growth therefore makes migrations a way of life.
- Whether it’s growth in number of users of a system, or number of developers
- Migrations are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on tech-debt.
- They also occupy the awkward territory of reduced immediate contribution today
in exchange for more capacity tomorrow.
- This makes them controversial to schedule
- They also get more expensive to carry out as your system grows.
Running good migrations
De-risk (trigger word, if you know you know💀)
- As quick & cheaply as reasonably possible
- Workshop it with one or two of the most challenged teams. Document, evolve, and migrate with them, so you can build a safe, repeatable playbook for the rest of the organisation.
- Effective de-risking is essential, each team who endorses a migration is making a bet on you that you’re going to get this thing done.
Enable
- On top of documentation, try to maximise on programmatic migration
Finish
Starting but not finishing migrations often incurs significant technical debt, so your incentives and recognition structure should be careful to avoid perverse incentives.