For all you heroes fighting a daily battles convincing teams, managers, tester, that deploying software work to production anytime using CI it’s possible, well here is a story that might encourage you. (Thanks to Xavier Allue).
In the 1950’s, a japanese team struggled with a big die press. The die press could not be changed to new conditions fast enough, so they always had to work with big batches in order to make up for lost setup time. (big software project ring a bell?). The team decided to get that setup time down from double digit to single digit number. It took them years. But – they actually finally made it.
At the time, there was an alternative point of view:
"While these japanese guys like to promote the notion of fast setup
changes, this simply isn’t viable on very large scale activities. For
example, this die press here next to me uses 3-ton dies and takes five
foremen a full day to configure…"
