How do you manage product releases? If it’s over the weekend, how do you keep your staff motivated who compromise personal / family time?
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Unfortunately, we never sleep.. i.e. customer service runs round the clock, across time zones. But what you suggest makes perfect sense for many industries.
I am not saying that it stops but when the impact will be the smallest. It is more about minimizing impact rather than stopping customer service.
Never during the weekend. We do multiple releases per week. Always during normal office hours. We are careful to try to finish our releases by Thursday at the latest. We use feature toggles to do partial releases when required. Deployments are done using a canary release and gradual deployment until all customers are in the latest version.
Hot fixes can be deployed at any moment.
Thanks <mention id="617fe6fe1106ab00011b4b19" displayname="Hernan Garcia"></mention>.. then the chances are that you have quite a robust QA process with a good degree of automation OR that your product isn’t nascent anymore.
Since day one (more than 11 years ago) we built a lot of automation and a robust deployment pipeline. Lot's of test automation for the critical path of the products. We also have robust metrics on rate of failures and do a version of canary deployments, what allow us to catch any serious issues or regression early on.<br>Sometimes this is difficult to achieve with legacy systems that don't have the infrastructure build around them. I would say try to invest on those areas, while sometimes difficult to quantify the value to stakeholders I found that it pays out in the end.
It depends on the business. You need to assess when your slow periods are with you customers and make the changes in the most quiet times. You might be surprised when your slow periods are, they are not always weekends or evenings. One company I worked for it was a Wednesday morning.