On the Importance of Observability-Driven Software Development

Charity Majors, CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb, discusses the importance of observability-driven development and software ownership in engineering teams. She emphasizes the need for developers to be on call for their own code to create a direct feedback loop and enhance responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their software. Majors highlights the distinction between the health of a system and the actual user experience, arguing for a focus on outcomes rather than the infrastructure itself. She critiques the current reliance on tools that promise more than they deliver, advocating instead for simplicity and adaptability in tool usage. Observability is framed as a key aspect of understanding complex distributed systems, allowing developers to reason about unknowns and new questions in real time. Majors also stresses the importance of embedding observability early in the development cycle to ensure code quality and reliability, and she calls for cultural shifts in software teams to prioritize operational work alongside feature development, ensuring that on-call duties are manageable and not detrimental to personal well-being.