ARTICLES

Fear of Deployments

From Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions by Jeffery Smith

This article covers:

• Longer release cycles and their impact to the team’s deployment confidence

• Automation techniques for deployments

• The value of code deployment artifacts

• Feature flags for releasing incomplete code

_______________________________________________________

Take 37% off Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions. Just enter fccsmithje into the discount code box at manning.com.
_______________________________________________________

Patrick runs the product organization at the FunCo Company. One day his phone rings and it’s Jaheim from the sales department. Jaheim has been working his way into a sales meeting with a Quantisys, a large player in the market. He finally got a chance to demo the software in front of the Quantisys senior leadership team and they absolutely fell in love with it, but like all dream deals, there was a catch; the software needed to integrate with Quantisys’ current billing system. Jaheim knows that billing integrations are high on the list of features the development team is working on. He hopes to get the integration Quantisys needed prioritized and implemented quickly, enough to possibly salvage the deal.

Patrick listens to Jaheim’s story and agrees that it’s a tremendous opportunity. He can re-arrange priorities to land such a large customer, but there’s one catch. Even if the feature could be completed in two weeks’ time, the product operates on a quarterly release cycle. It was February and the next release cycle wasn’t until mid-April. Patrick went back and worked with the development team to see if they could figure out a way to do a targeted release with this feature set. Unfortunately, there were a slew of commits to the code base it’s difficult to untangle with any level of safety. Jaheim took the April date back to the customer, but they couldn’t wait that long to make a decision on their software; in April the feature would be brand new and might suffer from any number of bugs, delivery delays and general compatibility issues. The customer opted for another solution, Jaheim missed out on closing a great deal and FunCo lost what surely would have been a significant contributor to revenue.