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One of the better "hot takes" was saved till the end: >A deploy freeze means that folks are not actively trying to make progress on a dev project that needs to
by avidiax 5y ago
One of the better "hot takes" was saved till the end:
>A deploy freeze means that folks are not actively trying to make progress on a dev project that needs to be deployed. Deploy freezes need to equate to either time off, or time spent on things that do not need to be deployed when complete.
The author does a bad job explaining why. If you allow deployable work to progress without deployment during a holiday code freeze, you are just shifting, sometimes magnifying risk post-code freeze. All that undeployed work during the code freezer will increase the rate of change tremendously post-code-freeze.
- henryfjordan 5y agoDeploy freezes are not necessarily about preventing incidents, but rather controlling the risk (which is not just "what broke" but "how long was it broken"). A normally small incident that happens while everyone is out enjoying their holidays might end up being worse than a large incident that happens at 10am on a Tuesday while everyone is at their desks and can respond immediately. There's also varying costs (not all monetary) to responding to an incident. I'm going to be very upset at my employer if I get called in on Christmas because there was a deploy going on that caused issues. First week of January, that's just expected.
- erik_seaberg 5y agoThis. The goal is to push the looming incident back until your staff will be on the grid, awake, and sober, and your customers are just having a normal day.
- erik_seaberg 5y agoIf we freeze for two weeks, spending the next four weeks deploying six weeks’ worth of feature branches shouldn’t be that big a deal. It’s another form of tech debt, and your process needs to allow using it judiciously (CI/CD often gets this wrong).