Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Deploy Every Iteration?

How would you change your software development process if you had to deploy to production at the end of every iteration? Do you see yourself requiring "hardening iterations"?

Deploying every iteration is not for the faint of heart. You need to ensure that the software you are releasing is solid and integrates well with the other pieces. It requires you to have your engineering practices really down, reducing the time you spend in doing the release (a.k.a. hardening iterations) as much as possible.

If you look at the activities that happen in a hardening iteration to enable a release, you generally have building the software, reviewing code, regression plus load testing and at last deploying it. This set of activities will probably grow or shrink depending on the regulatory environment you are in.

To reduce the time you spend building the software you need to automate your build process as much as you can. In the Java space you can use tools like Ant and Maven, for .Net Nant is an alternative. Maven is useful because besides just automating the build it generates a nice web site with reports about the software you're building.

Once you have a good build, i.e. no compilation issues, you need to check it to make sure it has no regressions or bugs. This is probably where automation will give you the most benefits. The shorter you can get your regression tests to take, the more time you will have to actually write code. There are plenty of tools out there that will let you automate your tests. If you are writing web applications you might want to look at Selenium. Regression tests are not the only requisite to deployment in some shops, you might also need to load test your software to make sure you still satisfy your performance service level agreements.

Finally you need a fast and easy way of deploying your application. Here I have no tool advice for you. On the bright side, if you are releasing every iteration you won't have a lot to deploy and thus it should be quick and easy. The longer you code, the more complex your deployment might be.

As you add the three automation pieces above, consider implementing a continuous integration process. It would allow you to eventually have code travel from the software developer mind to production in no time! A few free tools in this space are Hudson, CruiseControl, Continuum, etc.

In an Utopian world, every time a software developer commit a change to your Source Code Management system (you have one of those, right?), you would repeat the whole process automatically and send the software to production. I do not recommend you to do this, except the simplest of the cases!

As you can see, if you inspect your deployment process constantly, you will be able to eventually spend little to no time on "hardening" your software for deployment. Repetitive tasks should be left to a computer, not to a highly paid professional ;)

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