Should teams create pull requests for code owned by other teams?

Summary

This video delves into the importance of enabling cross-team pull requests in large organizations to improve software development velocity. The speaker argues that allowing engineers to make changes across different team repositories can help overcome capacity issues and bottlenecks. They emphasize the need for familiarity and standardization in the development process, similar to a McDonald's-style system, to make teams comfortable with collaborative changes. The goal is to create a more flexible, efficient development environment where developers work on features instead of being limited to specific services, ensuring higher productivity and faster delivery.

Takeaways

• 😀 Cross-team pull requests can help software engineers move faster and address capacity issues by allowing them to contribute to other teams' codebases.
• 😀 Emotional attachment to code can create challenges when enabling cross-team contributions, as developers often hesitate to let others modify their work.
• 😀 Shifting from service ownership to feature ownership helps remove bottlenecks and allows teams to work faster by modifying multiple services as needed.
• 😀 Standardizing practices across teams, such as having consistent conventions and onboarding processes, makes it easier for developers to contribute to other codebases.
• 😀 Cross-team collaboration requires both technical solutions (such as similar project setups) and social solutions (such as a sense of security within the community).
• 😀 Effective onboarding processes help teams feel comfortable making pull requests across different repos by making the codebase more accessible and familiar.
• 😀 Reducing the dependency on a single team’s ownership of a codebase allows for more flexible resource allocation and can prevent bottlenecks in development.
• 😀 A strong, community-driven culture of development encourages engineers to help each other and collaborate more efficiently across teams.
• 😀 Just like auto-scaling in infrastructure, cross-team pull requests allow for dynamic adjustment of resources and more efficient workload distribution across teams.
• 😀 The biggest challenge in implementing cross-team pull requests is ensuring that both teams (the owner and the contributor) feel secure and comfortable making changes to the codebase.

Q & A

Why should large companies allow software engineers to create pull requests across teams' repositories?

Allowing software engineers to create pull requests across teams' repositories helps address capacity issues and allows for faster development by enabling teams to leverage resources across different services, especially when dependencies span multiple services.

What is the main challenge in implementing cross-team pull requests in large organizations?

The main challenge lies not in making it technically feasible but in creating a culture and practice that feels secure for the organization, ensuring that teams are comfortable with other teams making changes to their code.

What issue arises when developers form emotional attachments to their code?

When developers become attached to their code, they may be reluctant to allow other teams to make changes, creating silos and dependency bottlenecks, which can slow down product development.

How can organizations overcome the challenge of managing dependencies between different services?

Organizations can address dependency issues by focusing on feature ownership rather than specific services, enabling teams to work on features across multiple services while maintaining control over their parts of the system.

What is the concept of 'feature ownership' and why is it important?

'Feature ownership' means that teams are responsible for the end-to-end delivery of a feature, including changes to multiple services and repositories. This approach promotes faster development, as it reduces dependencies and bottlenecks that arise from teams being confined to a specific service.

Why is creating familiarity across different services important for cross-team pull requests?

Familiarity across services is crucial because it makes it easier for teams to confidently make changes in other teams' codebases without fear of breaking the system, thus enhancing collaboration and speeding up development.

How can a McDonald's-like system help in promoting cross-team pull requests?

A McDonald's-like system would establish standardized conventions for how projects are set up, how pull requests are handled, and how new developers are onboarded, making it easier for engineers to navigate different codebases and contribute to cross-team work.

What role does effective onboarding play in enabling cross-team pull requests?

Effective onboarding is essential because it ensures that developers can quickly understand and contribute to different codebases, making them feel comfortable making changes in areas outside their primary responsibility.

What is the impact of not having a standardized process for development across teams?

Without standardized processes, teams may develop inefficient or incompatible systems, making it difficult to collaborate and forcing other teams to be overly reliant on the primary owners of services. This creates bottlenecks and reduces the overall product development speed.

How does cross-team pull request standardization lead to more efficient software development?

Standardizing cross-team pull requests allows for more dynamic allocation of resources, reduces bottlenecks, and enables teams to more efficiently leverage available capacity across the organization, leading to higher product development velocity.