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?"
I push to production fairly often. Our company's Visual Studios have been configured with test cases that make testing easy, and therefore we can push to production much more often than those who do not use Visual Studio.
Why not talk to your colleagues and suggest ways of speeding things up?
It's good to talk.
Release when ready is quite a good frequency :-)
>> Slashdotters, how often do you push software changes into production,
3 times a month, generally.
>> and what best practices allow you to maintain that deployment rate without chaos?"
IMHO, you can't. Having a deadline every week, programmers cut corners to make dates. QA cuts corners to make the date. This much code changing without any "bake time" inevitably leads to an unstable code base, full of "corner cuts" from the last N releases.
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.
This really seems like it depends on WHAT your company does. Pushing to production a browser or a utility weekly or even daily is a lot easier and less disruptive than say a OS or a major software product thats used by hundreds of large companies. I would say the biggest obstacle is to get rid of the paper process, bring in git or something else for changes that everyone can view, and limit the signing offs to production, QA, or gold master (or whatever your company calls them) while keeping the dev stuff out of it so that the dev team can be more flexible. Also have a pretty good test lab/suite that will enable you to test stuff on the fly on multiple machines and configuration. Case in point Apple has a testing lab of EVERY machine they have made for the last 3 years in multiple configurations for their software. Granted they are a closed ecosystem so its easy for them to do that, but generally you could get a good roundup of machines to use that span from the insane configs to the "are you fing kidding me you are using that???" type stuff.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Slashdot posted this story earlier,
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-04/facebook-the-making-of-1-billion-users
Interesting read on how Facebook, arguably the largest website challenge so far this century updates daily.
At $dayjob, we decide to release and our process takes about an hour. All the automated tests are run by Jenkins CI, and are run again during the release on every box being deployed to in order to ensure stability. We tend to deploy to User-Acceptance Testing boxes before full production boxes.
At the game company, we wrote a system that works like:
1) Tag release in git
2) Release is pushed to beta servers. Beta players get immediate updates.
3) Click button in Jenkins to run stable release
Completely automated, even down to restarting the servers in a staggered fashion to ensure that users always have a game to connect to (even if they have to disconnect in 20 minutes to receive the client update).
Automated testing, Continual Integration, and automated release processes (including cfengine3 and custom Perl scripts working with Git) come together to produce a painless release process. Since it's easy, we can do it whenever we want. As soon as it starts releasing bad code, we'll have to put process in place to ensure bad code does not reach our stable users.
Sometimes all of those meetings and paperwork serve a useful purpose when an application is critical. If a one-day build of instagram doesn't work, then the only consequence is that there are fewer grainy photographs of someone's cat. If a one-day build of a power distribution system doesn't work, then an entire city loses electricity.
-Glires
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.
As a customer I hate daily updates to my applications. Unless the application is in Alpha or Beta it is very disconcerting to see updates at that frequency. I only want to see an update that quick when something is really broken. If brokeness is a daily occurence then maybe you need to slow down.
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.