Tight shoulders. Restless nights. Caffeine jitters.

Software release stress is real.

Fortunately, there are adjustments you can make to take the pressure off your team and place it on your competition.

In this guide, we’ll share some pieces of advice on refining release processes that surfaced from our annual user conference, Galaxy.

We hope that eventually all software teams will stop sweating releases and gradually embrace the zen of continuous delivery. And maybe some of these stories can provide the inspiration to get started down that path.

Don’t fear testing in production

The term “test in production” is polarizing, but that’s largely because it’s misunderstood.

Some see the phrase and immediately feel like it’s telling developers to be reckless, when our view is the exact opposite.

“Testing in production” refers to the practice of running code on production servers, using real data from real users, without showing the new behavior to the majority of users. These tests are frequently run during the final stages before releasing software to a broad audience.

To be clear, testing in production is not a substitute for quality assurance (QA), or a shortcut to eliminate unit testing or integration testing. Instead, it is an extension of testing and QA control points into the most realistic environment possible: the real-world.

Testing in production becomes a lot less scary when you have the ability to immediately turn off a test through a feature flag if something goes wrong.

Feature flags are a software development process that can enable or disable functionality remotely without deploying code. This allows you to deploy new features without making them visible to users. Feature flags help decouple deployment from release letting you manage the full lifecycle of a feature.

And using feature flags can give you the confidence you need to do things you never thought possible—like testing in production on Black Friday.

To read full download the whitepaper:

7 Tips for Stress-Free Software Releases

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *