Release It!, 2nd Edition

Countdown and Launch

We’d had at least six different “official” launch dates. Three months of load testing and emergency code changes. Two whole management teams. Three targets for the required user load level (each revised downward).

Today, however, was the day of triumph. All the toil and frustration, the forgotten friends, and the divorces were going to fade away after we launched.

The marketing team—many of whom hadn’t been seen since the last of the requirements-gathering meetings two years earlier—gathered in a grand conference room for the launch ceremony, with champagne to follow. The technologists who had turned their vague and ill-specified dreams into reality gathered around a wall full of laptops and monitors that we set up to ...