Don't Even Think About It
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We have a very long, cumbersome, procedure-laden process for... everything, especially product releases. For gargantuan projects, it provides some sanity in cases where users want immediate gratification and managers (dependent on user approval) want to deploy stuff as quickly as possible - usually by bypassing testing.
My current project is tiny, completely contained in a single 10K ksh script. Unfortunately, by the time we pack in the minimum set of jar files required for the standard build (none of which are used by the script), the tarball is 43MB. Then there are the required installations in the qa and integration environments (both of which need to requested, scheduled and performed by another team), the mandatory running by qa of the automated tests (3 minutes) which need to be scheduled (8-10 days) in advance, the mandatory signoff from the qa team (2-3 days), the scheduling of the deployment with the deployment team (minimum of 1 week notice, 2 weeks preferred) and the actual deployment (groups in the US, London and Hong Kong must be on a conference call, even if the deployment is as simple as copying and untarring the file), a 30 second code change takes a month to deploy.
I've managed to lap myself and have the next release ready before the current release is deployed. I even got qa to sign off on it. I asked my boss if we could skip the planned release and just give the new(er) tarball to the deployment folks, to which he replied: Don't even think about it; we will follow the procedures to the letter at all times, productivity doesn't enter into the equation!
sigh
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@snoofle said:
...groups in the US, London and Hong Kong must be on a conference call...
You work in finance?
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@snoofle said:
For gargantuan projects, it provides some sanity in cases where users want immediate gratification and managers (dependent on user approval) want to deploy stuff as quickly as possible - usually by bypassing testing.
<snip>
I've managed to lap myself and have the next release ready before the current release is deployed. I even got qa to sign off on it. I asked my boss if we could skip the planned release and just give the new(er) tarball to the deployment folks, to which he replied: Don't even think about it; we will follow the procedures to the letter at all times, productivity doesn't enter into the equation!
sigh
So you get sanity on the big stuff in exchange for insanity on the small stuff. Being at the end of a big project, that seems like a small price to pay.
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Do you get paid to stay 'fresh' on this code until it comes out the other side or is that some other developer's problem?
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@aesis said:
I own the code - it's a dinky little script to put a couple of stats up on a web page created by a third party tool, but management up and down the chain (5 levels up that I know about) live and die by the output.Do you get paid to stay 'fresh' on this code until it comes out the other side or is that some other developer's problem?
