nicwest

A few months back I saw a comment[1] from one of the stripe co-founders where they mentioned they were thinking about "pace layering" and how it applied to their company and processes.

A quick google turned up an interesting article summing up a concept with the same name[2] by Stewart Brand. In the Acknowledgements section he mentioned a chapter in his book, which I tracked down and read[3]. While there are some clear parallels to software/product development, and I actually enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, I was left with more questions than real answers.

I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of some more reading material on the subject, preferably in a tech/business context? Personally I like to do my professional reading with books, but articles, talks, podcasts, etc would also be super useful.

Thanks Team!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929631

[2]: https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2

[3]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38310.How_Buildings_Learn

We are a smallish tech team (11 developers) actively developing a product where downtime has immediate negative revenue implications.

It's starting to get difficult to ship changes without breaking something somewhere.

so my questions are:

1. what is your teams approach to quality assurance

2. what is your teams approach to quality control

3. at what point does it make sense to hire dedicated staff to handle these areas, and what skill/experience set should we be looking for.