Principal Software Engineer, Phil Helm, talks about ways that he measures speed to market for MetLife.
Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know that that’s been explicitly defined. It’s one of those requirements where you could have multiple interpretations of it. I think, from a business perspective, it’s more of a gut feel. The one case that keeps popping up in my head is once we have this architecture implemented and in production, the business comes to us and says this API isn’t quite right or this use case isn’t quite right. How quickly can we change it? It’s more about extensibility, really or modify-ability. To me, if you’re focused on the quality attributes of micro-services, then you can meet that business requirement even though it’s more of a perception based requirement.
We need speed to market. Well what does that mean? We just want it faster. Well what does that mean? At times you don’t necessarily get the answer that you want but that’s our job, to take that and say how can I translate that into a solution that the business comes back six months later and says wow, you implemented that really quickly and now, if I ask you for a change, it’s in the field in an hour or a week, as opposed to creating the monolith and the waterfall methodology, it takes me hours or weeks, months of red tape to push something to production.
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