Posts Tagged: process

Deployment — No Comments
23
Dec 08

Index page “Under construction” while deploying

I have noticed a few times earlier on different sites an index pages with title “Please be patient, while we are deploying new software version. You’ll like it”. And one day, I decided that it is the time, to integrate the similar feature to our automated deployment process.

I think, that this page has to show user some indication of action progress(real or fictional), not just a static page, user has to refresh to see if it is finished or not. What user has to do – is just open once the site, see the message, that it is “Under construction”, and stay the page for a while.

It has to refresh itself until the time, deployment has finished. After that it has to load index page of new version’s website.

I wan’t to tell you, how and when this new index page is setting up. Right, all the deployment processes can vary a lot depending on the software it deploys, environment it uses, deployment tools etc.

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Continuous initegration — No Comments
23
Dec 08

phpUnderControl

Recently, I had an invitation to participate to some project, which where in development for about a year. The product was quite successful, but stack holders decided to improve its performance, reduce bug-level, develop lots of new features, otherwise get a more loyal customers and make it more profitable. So, for the start, let me tell you about the environment. It was the following:

  • absence of automated process of deployment
  • zero unit-tests code coverage
  • quite low skills of working with repository

So, the consequences are not unexpected:

  • big amount of bugs, even in production
  • deployment was quite rare, difficult and sometimes error prone(especially in the case, when there was need to rollback to previous version)
  • software integration problems
  • DB integration problems
  • consequently, low motivation for producing lots of new code, because it is always scary and many unpredictable bugs arises in different places

Significant part of those problems can be eliminated by improving the development and deployment process. That is what we decided to do, at first. So, after that I  decided to talk with the people, mostly involved in the planned switch – developers, QAs and the system administrators.
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