Increasing Bus Factor with Cycle

Bus Factor is a measure of risk to a project or organization due to the loss of key personnel. For software engineering teams, a low bus factor (meaning only a few people hold critical knowledge or skills) can lead to complications that result in product failures

Implications of Low Bus Factor

Imagine your lead developer is unexpectedly pulled away from the job and doesn't know when he will return, you have a huge deployment scheduled but have no one who can step in. Next thing you are weeks behind on your deployment and have lost a customer in the shuffle. If not addressed, these situations can lead to a number of issues including:

Reduced Productivity - The absence of key team members can lead to a significant drop in productivity as remaining team members may not have the necessary expertise to continue the work effectively.

Increased Risk - High dependency on a few individuals increases the risk of project delays or failures if those individuals leave the organization or are unavailable for an extended period.

Onboarding Challenges - New team members may find it difficult to ramp up if critical knowledge is not well-documented or shared, leading to longer onboarding times

Maintenance Issues - If only a few people understand the system's intricacies, maintaining and updating the software becomes challenging, leading to potential technical debt.

Lack of Innovation - When knowledge is concentrated in a few individuals, it can stifle innovation as fewer people contribute to problem-solving and idea generation.

Scalability Problems - As the organization grows, scaling processes and knowledge transfer becomes difficult if expertise is not widely distributed.

Dependency on Hero Culture - A low bus factor often leads to a "hero culture" where a few individuals are seen as indispensable, which can create an unhealthy work environment and dependency on these "heroes" to resolve critical issues.

So how does an organization increase bus factor and mitigate these negative outcomes? To state, it's essential to instill best practices for knowledge sharing, standardization, documentation, and training/onboarding. Tooling choices can make a major impact on increasing an organization's bus factor. With the ultimate goal of putting your team in a position of resilience with the ability to pivot easily regardless of what team members are available to help.

Increasing Bus Factor with Cycle

The Cycle platform's developer centric container orchestration model increases bus factor naturally. With Cycle, the whole team can be involved with operations tasks that might otherwise be limited to platform engineers, DevOps engineers, or other team members that have niche, specialized talent and knowledge about specific deployment. Let's take a closer look at how some of Cycle's paradigms create a space for teamwork and collaboration instead of siloed knowledge.

Enforced Standardization

Utilizing the Cycle platform means adopting a standardized platform that is opinionated. Opinionated for a reason, K8s and other tools have thousands of ways to do something, where with Cycle the user has the building blocks to create unique solutions, but there are many guardrails and best practices to keep developers out of the weeds.

The simplified, opinionated approach leads to a way of deploying and managing your applications that any engineer can get comfortable with quickly. It's a great way to have the full influence of your engineering team behind you, without needing to worry about configuration sprawl or niche/bespoke deployments everywhere.

Automated Processes

From the moment you deploy from your repository and into pipelines all the way through to back ups and rainbow deployments, Cycle provides teams with automated repeatable processes that are easily repeatable. Keeping things simple is how we make sure that whether you are onboarding a new Head of Engineering or a new Developer, the tools and processes are in place to keep your business moving no matter what.

Abstracted Infrastructure

When you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure supporting your applications all you have to worry about is making quality experiences for your customers. No matter the provider, in the cloud or on prem, you can use Cycle to mix and match infrastructure to run anywhere in the world.

Even switching providers is natively built into the platform. Host nodes self-standardize regardless of provider & Cycle automatically builds all the networks needed for nodes to connect in an encrypted manner You no longer need AWS, or GCP experts to get your product to market. All of the worry and complexity is abstracted away with Cycle.

By adopting Cycle best practices and these strategies, organizations, whether you are a lean startup or a legacy corporation, can effectively increase bus factor, ensuring that critical knowledge and skills related to DevOps and software engineering are distributed across the team, thereby enhancing resilience and reducing risk.

Bus Factor is Important

Leaving critical infrastructure, decisions and knowledge in the hands of one or two individuals leaves a huge blind spot in organizations and their chances of overcoming potential incidents and product failures. Understanding the warning signs of low bus factor and arming your team with the tools to increase it, is one of the more important decisions you can make right now as a lean startup or established corporation. Don't be left with an outage on your hands scrambling to get services online, the next time your lead developer goes on vacation!

💡 Interested in trying the Cycle platform? Create your account today! Want to drop in and have a chat with the Cycle team? We'd love to have you join our public Cycle Slack community!