Ask Slashdot: How Often Do You Push To Production?

First time accepted submitter Stiletto writes "I work for a traditional 'old school' software company that is trying to move into web services, now competing with smaller, nimbler 'Web 2.0' companies. Unfortunately our release process is still stuck in the '90s. Paperwork and forms, sign-off meetings, and documentation approvals make it impossible to do even minor deployments to production faster than once a month. Major releases go out a couple of times a year. I've heard from colleagues in Bay Area companies who release weekly or daily (or even multiple times a day), allowing them to adapt quickly. Slashdotters, how often do you push software changes into production, and what best practices allow you to maintain that deployment rate without chaos?"

Comments

As soon as it's ready

[knetcomp]

Most companies I've worked for have a continuous deployment cycle. All changes, from small bug fixes to major releases go through a ticketing system. After the ticket has gone through all the steps (code review, QA, UAT) it goes into the deployment manager's queue, who then deploys the change to production depending on each ticket's priority. This means that in general, changes go out as soon as they are ready, sometimes up to two times a day for the same project.