Automating Releases

Release processes can be horribly manual and laborious. Rafe Colburn lists a few reasons why releases can suck.

The previous place I was at release day was on the second Tuesday morning of the month and releases went through at 11:00am which included draining over a couple of hundred webservers. Odds first, then evens, until twenty four hours later the entire web facing servers were on the new release code base.

It was a pretty slick operation and the main reason for the success of the release team was automation. They had scripted the whole process, nothing was manual.

The main reason releases suck is because the whole thing is manual and requires too many people to do something to make the release happen. This exponentially increases the margin for human error.

A simple rule in software engineering is if you do something twice, then script or code it. If you do it three times and haven't got it coded and in the source code repository you are not a software engineer...

Releases happen constantly so there is really no excuse for it not being automated in a company. There are plenty of chances to get the automation down as well as code bases go from dev to QA to stage to production. Really there is no excuse in this day and age for releases to suck.

If you look at continuous deployment it is an argument for automation taken to extreme lengths. Releases don't suck when they are automated. They do when they are manual.
Permalink, Automating Releases, Dec 2009, cam

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