Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Push to production as soon as the (many) automated tests that you have pass. This means you should have comprehensive unit tests and tests that run in the browser, probably written in Selenium. You'll also want to script your release so that you can do it with the push of a button. Once the tests pass, and the mechanics of a release are trivial, there is little reason to hold up a release.
I worked for a top 500 website (East coast) for 7 years that did weekly releases. Since I left, they decided that wasn't fast enough and now release multiple times per week. I'm now self-employed on my own website and release within an hour of finishing development of a feature.
I started my development career writing firmware for laser printers. When you are shipping code on a physical product, the cost of bugs can be quite high. Especially when it leads to returns or recalls because customers are not satisfied. Our release cycles there were 6 months+. Quite appropriately, IMO.
On the web, the cost of bugs is much lower. In most cases it is the only cost of another release. Sometimes it could cost more because of downtime, but good automated test coverage mitigates that risk pretty well (especially if there is load testing involved). The worst case would be data-corruption, but I've never actually seen that in practice from a release, that has only been related to hardware failure or accidents in my experience.
I think the submitter IS talking to colleagues and looking for suggestions right here...
We do a major release about every 2 months, with maintenance stuff going every 2 weeks. There's pressure to speed this up. On the release side of things we're streamlining our documentation requirements and automating everything we can. We're also moving to a continuous delivery model for our regular test builds... if it's tagged, it goes to QA and an automagical report goes out with a list of resolved defects. This requires the developers to package things cleanly and consistently, but it also gives us an amazing amount of data to mine and I like to think that it helps to improve our overall quality.
This doesn't address requirements gathering or development methodologies, but I can't really speak to those.
If he can't deploy to production in one step, he needs to fix that first.
I'm not talking about from dev box to production. I'm talking about the physical act of someone running a single command (or for the Winlazy, pressing a button) then walking away. All code checkouts from source control, database changes, app server code deployments, web server restarts—whatever—happen without user intervention.
He should also be able to roll back in one step.
For all the meetings, forms, etc., it sounds like there is A LOT of CYA in that company. In that case, it is cultural and can only be changed from the top. Until/unless the company becomes less risk adverse, there is no point in trying to become more "agile" (i.e., risk-accepting) except making your job easier. Build your tools/scripts/whatever to make it easier to do stuff.
tl;dr: If you want a more nimble company, switch jobs.
Yeah, right.