Brownfield

This is a pretty commonly used phrase so I won’t belabor the point, but it’s an important trap to be cognizant of when sharing resources. The most common solution to this problem appears to be “chargeback accounting” where ever mission and cost center has to justify their budget through revenue, even if it’s internal services.

The drift to low performance trap is incredibly pertinent to large enterprises and public sector organizations. In particular, system administrators and security practitioners appear to have many government programs held hostage by nightmarish controls and delays. “Everything takes a long time because [procurement, security, network, infrastructure, et cetera].”

Escalation or “Arms Race” is a feedback loop where increasing intensity is the only option for multiple participants in a system. The most obvious example of this is competitive exclusion, why just a few companies have the vast majority of government contracts. This anti-competitive behavior may be related to the drift to low performance.

Addiction in this sense is different from chemical dependence, though parallels are obvious. The idea here is that the system operates in a deteriorating baseline state for periods of time. After that state has created obvious problems, some external factor saves the day and fixes everything.

The original problem is never addressed, so it resurfaces later.

A policy like “use best practices in the pipeline” will result in a lot of jobs being disallowed. These bad practices are likely the first dozen baby steps toward better and eventually best practices.

GitLab’s developers use a pull workflow so the assigned field is editable by anyone. The intended worfklow is to leave the issue unassigned (though tagged for a team) and when a developer is ready, they assign it to themself and work on it. Assignment is seen as a “leave this alone if it’s not you” sort of signal rather than “someone wants me to get this done.”

Brownfield organizations typically have policies that were written under a very different development paradigm and create more problems than they solve under current Agile and DevOps practices.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) or Deployment (also CD) can be tricky enough on greenfield projects. What should be expected from a brownfield application and what groundwork is necessary?

The work for this project has a lot of external depndencies and a relatively low priority in the grand scheme.