Who Owns Deployments - Dev or IT?

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday December 12, 2006 @11:45PM from the custody-battles-are-always-nasty dept.

txpenguin asks: "I am IT manager for a small software company. We host several generations of our applications in a fairly complex environment. Our systems are very much inter-dependent (clustering, replication, heavily loaded, and so forth), and bad changes tend to have a domino effect. Additionally, it seems that there are always those who need to be 'in the loop', but aren't aware of changes which affect them. There is a constant battle between IT and Development regarding who should handle the deployment of new code releases and database schema changes to production systems. Dev doesn't understand the systems, and IT does not know the code well. How do you handle this at your company? What protocols seem to work best? Can there be a middle ground?"

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Re:Speaking as a developer by arachnoprobe · 2006-12-13 00:01 · Score: 3, Informative

I think thats a good comment. That would also force the Dev Team to write a good documentation and spec.
Re:Middle ground by mjpaci · 2006-12-13 01:53 · Score: 3, Informative

My company (~2,500 ppl) has moved to this model. However, we have dedicated "deployment engineers" who take the developers' documentation and follow it to a T. If there is an issue, they roll back. At first nobody liked the idea, but as time progressed it has started to work well. The deployment engineers were taken from the server teams and the DBA team and formed into a new group of about 10 people.

--Mike