Release It!, 2nd Edition

A Million Dollars Here, a Million Dollars There

A lot is on the line here: your project’s success, your stock options or profit sharing, your company’s survival, and even your job. Systems built for QA often require so much ongoing expense, in the form of operations cost, downtime, and software maintenance, that they never reach profitability, let alone net positive cash for the business (reached only after the profits generated by the system pay back the costs incurred in building it.) These systems exhibit low availability, direct losses in missed revenue, and indirect losses through damage to the brand.

During the hectic rush of a development project, you can easily make decisions that optimize development cost at the expense of operational ...