I wonder how all these absolutist methodologies really work when you take subjectivity and our general inability to measure anything reliably away? I say this because we've tried all of them after someone read an article on a blog saying it'd solve all our problems. And we always have the same problems afterwards despite people promoting that it solved them. Sometimes even worse ones.

The root cause in my company is we hire the lowest cost outsourcing outfit we can find, which hires inexperienced juniors and pretends they are senior and has a huge staff turnover because who the hell wants to work like that for more than 12 months. But of course changing the repo structure and process will compensate for that.

My observation is that a good engineering team will self-organise a methodology that works. The methodology is unimportant compared to getting a good engineering team. I am fortunate that I work in a small niche pocket in the organisation that has good engineers and has resisted normalising with the process churn of the rest of the organisation.

We run a "dark ages" team really. We were on SVN until 2020-ish, because, well it worked fine for us. Now we're on github on commandment but it is used like SVN. We have light feature branches. Master is always stable. Releases are tagged off master. At no point do we use any other github features not even PRs. CI is makefiles. Push to ECR/S3 by human. Deployment is makefiles. Comms is email because Slack is too distracting and demands immediacy. Issue tracking is a 17 year old JIRA project with a default workflow. We have the lowest defect rate, the lowest time to market and highest ROI per head in the entire org and we don't have or need a platform/sre/devops team supporting us.

We are a disliked because we didn't do anything for over 10 years other than deliver software.