Change Advisory Boards Don't Work

Change Advisory Boards (CABs) are commonly used by organizations to review changes before they are executed in production, often to comply with regulations or improve reliability by catching mistakes. However, research highlighted in "Accelerate" by Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble suggests that CABs may do more harm than good by negatively impacting lead time, deployment frequency, and restore time without reducing change failure rates. The DevOps movement emphasizes the importance of quick and small changes, as well as a focus on Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) rather than preventing all failures, which can lead to more resilient systems. CABs often lead to delays and inefficiencies due to their batch processing of changes and lack of context understanding, making them less effective than expert code reviews conducted within the development team. Effective code reviews should be timely, context-aware, and involve knowledgeable peers rather than large committees, enabling organizations to improve their deployment processes and business outcomes. The ideal approach is to implement agile and lean methodologies that emphasize speed, quality, and innovation while minimizing bureaucratic overhead, thereby aligning with the four key metrics of lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR, and change failure rate for better business performance.