Teams working on multiple codebases lack ownership and, especially the mental space to understand and keep the corresponding systems healthy.

Team topologies

So micro services driven too far so that working on a single service is not enough to keep a team busy. I work on multiple code bases and while they are very much in the same domain and have a lot of commonalities, it’s then that the small differences start to stick out like sore thumbs. 

Like 2 frontends for the same functionality, but one is for external customers and the other for internal employees working in branches. They are built using the same ui stack, but have a different philosophy for automated testing. One uses mocks from a mocked backend api while the other uses client side code to avoid server lookups. The release procedure changed for 1 but not for the other because of reasons. So now you have to think what’s the procedure again? This is often the way it goes, change happens for 1 but because of lack of priority and less urgency not for the other, so now you have to maintain 2 varieties. From architecture, design, processes down to the level of the code, the configuration items (naming). Everything increases the cognitive load and the chance of fuckups