The fallacy of “scalability from day 1”

Imagine you are starting a new project. The team is motivated, the whiteboard has been wiped clean, and the first question in the room is: “Which microservices do we need?”

“But locally everything went green!”

We all know this pain: your pipeline is green, your tests run locally in milliseconds. You deploy to staging or production – and it works. SQLSyntaxErrorException. Or worse: data is stored incorrectly.

The two pillars of requirements

It’s Friday afternoon, 4:00 p.m. You’ve just merged the feature, the pipeline is green, and you feel invincible. Then the Slack message comes from the product owner: “Hey, looks good, but why does X happen when I do Y? That was discussed completely …