How Facebook Ships Code

Hugh Pickens writes "The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week 'Boot Camp' training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to the live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. 'All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to,' writes yeegay. 'It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.' What is interesting for a company this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day."

Comments

no process

[mortonda]

any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will

That explains a LOT...

Fake

[MBCook]

It's too bad much of the article is wrong.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[morgan_greywolf]

Not all engineers are licensed. Civil engineers are usually licensed. Mechanical engineers and electrical engineers are usually not licensed. Similarly, there is no licensure for system engineers. There are "certifications" but these are essentially meaningless.

Same old tune

[trollertron3000]

We get to read this story every few years. Some company makes a popular product and all of a sudden they are the authority on development. News flash guys, enterprise software wasn't just invented and we've been rolling out features to millions of people for years. In environments where any discrepancy can lead to serious legal repercussions. So just for a second, hear us out. We know what we're doing and we don't need to reinvent it every few years because the guys from Facebook, Basecamp, Hacker news, or any other place said we're doing it wrong. Our bottom line and years of quality deliveries say we're doing it right. What do these guys have besides a history of rolling out mistakes? Their value is based on hype, not their code quality. Some of us don't have the luxury to make huge mistakes and have our customers be okay with it.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Urban Garlic]

The choosing is weirding, you're right, but as long as the meaning is clearing, it's not really probleming.