Production Readiness

There is a saying in XP that production starts on day one of the project. From the first day you write a line of code, you treat the project as if it were in production, and after that, you are merely making changes to a live system.

It’s a profound difference in how you view your code. Instead of viewing production and deployment as some event way off in the distant future, you imagine you and your team are in production today and start behaving accordingly.

Doing this has the following advantages:

1. Team respects the code base - leading to higher quality.
2. It’s easier to make changes - as a result of well refactored code.
3. Pride of ownership goes up - because team is doing quality work.
4. You can release at any moment - which is the only time we add value.