Compliance & Regulatory Standards Are NOT Incompatible with Modern Development Best Practices

Modern software development is all about fast feedback loops, with best practices like testing in production, continuous delivery, observability driven development, and feature flags. Yet I often hear people complaining that only startups can get away with doing these things; real, grown-up companies are subject to regulatory oversight, which prevents engineers from deploying their own code due to separation of concerns, requires managers to sign off on changes, etc.

This is categorically false: there is NOTHING in ANY regulation or standard to prevent you from using modern development best practices. Let's take a stroll through the regulatory landscape and do some mythbusting about what they do and don't say, and what this means for you. Teams that figure out how to follow modern best practices can build circles around teams that don't, which is a huge competitive advantage. Your competition is working on this right now: you should be too.