Teams Verify Some Integrations Without a Lab ​

Some featrues or parts of features can be verified before the code ever runs in a production-like / lab environment. Integration correctness is partially verified using automated tests that run without standing up the system.

Teams are able to tight-cycle with their close partner teams before they need to take anything to a lab. This dramatically reduces contention for limited lab space. It also means the quality is higher when code is first released to the lab. There are fewer lab blockages / outages. Together, these dramatically speed up the release cycle. Before, 100% of feature integrations needed to happen in the lab, waiting for a free lab often took weeks, and teams often needed to analyze their feature's behavior in a buggy system, which means they miss errors and waste time chansing down someone else's proglem. All of that goes away. Now > 50% of new features can be verified with < 1 hour of checking in a lab. > 75% of features find 0 bugs in the integration lab. When they do need to use a lab, wait times are usually less than an hour. The labs are clean and stable, so teams know that any issue they see is theirs, and they only debug their own problems.

Some platform capabilities / issues may also be verified this way. Many still require a lab & telemetry.