Google VP: 'Stubbing Your Toe Shouldn't Be Fatal'Google VP: 'Stubbing Your Toe Shouldn't Be Fatal'

Developers need tools that will help them test and safely roll out new features to users without compromising their business, says Adam Seligman, VP or developer relations at Google.

And not surprisingly, Seligman believes Google is well placed to offer developers the tools and support they need.

The Google man says organizations need to think about their application needs in terms of individual features, rather than think in terms of complete apps. To help them think that way, developers need to be confident that they can turn an idea into a feature that can be tested in a simple, quick and secure way, says Seligman, who joined Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) in January after more than six years at Salesforce.com Inc. . (Prior to joining Salesforce, Seligman also worked in developer relations for Microsoft, where he spent eight years.)

A fast, incremental upgrade development model is one that Google follows internally, he says. "We have a model where individual developers are incredibly empowered to ship code into production," Seligman says. "And to do that, you have to have things like automated testing, test builds, code review process, a collaborative source environment, and then push a little feature to production and route a small amount of traffic to it, to get data to see what happens."

He continues, "That's opposed to the old waterfall approach, where you wait six months, you come up with a giant release, you test it as best you can, and you ship it. And then everybody gets it and then things don't work... Google believes stubbing your toe shouldn't be fatal," Seligman states.

Figure 1: Google's Seligman, pointing proudly to his giraffe shoes. He says his daughter loves giraffes. (See Google Cloud Next in Photos, With Gorgeous Giraffe Footwear