Web Operations

Conclusion

I want to mention one last benefit of continuous deployment: morale. At a recent talk, an audience member asked me about the impact of continuous deployment on morale. This manager was worried that moving his engineers to a more rapid release cycle would stress them out, making them feel like they were always firefighting and releasing, and never had time for "real work." As luck would have it, one of IMVU's engineers happened to be in the audience at the time. He provided a better answer than I ever could. He explained that by reducing the overhead of doing a release, each engineer gets to work to his own release schedule. That means that as soon as an engineer is ready to deploy, he can. So, even if it's midnight, if your feature is ready to go, you can check in, deploy, and start talking to customers about it right away. No extra approvals, meetings, or coordination is required. Just you, your code, and your customers. It's pretty satisfying.