if it hurts, do it more often
expressionops cultureprogramming
The counterintuitive delivery principle: painful, risky activities become safe through frequency, not avoidance.
Popularized by Martin Fowler about deployment and integration: rare releases accumulate risk and atrophy the muscles; frequent ones force automation and shrink each change's blast radius. The direct philosophical rival of read-only Friday - and the argument that eventually wins.
Martin Fowler's formulation inverts the obvious response to a painful process, and the reasoning is that pain is usually a function of batch size and rarity rather than of the activity itself. A quarterly release is terrifying because it contains three months of changes and because nobody has recent practice.
The mechanism is that frequency forces the fix. If you release monthly, the process can stay manual and painful; if you release daily, it cannot, and the automation gets built because the alternative is unbearable. Smaller batches also mean that when something breaks, the set of candidate causes is small, which turns a two-day investigation into a ten-minute one.
It generalizes well beyond deployment. Painful merges mean integrating more often, painful failover testing means testing more often, painful backups mean restoring more often, and a painful on-call handover means doing it more deliberately. The consistent shape is that avoidance makes the underlying problem worse while hiding it, and that scheduling the pain converts it from an event into a practice, which is the only condition under which it gets improved.