Speedy Break Fix

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Speedy Break Fix

  • In my experience, agility wins over perfection.  Mainly because perfection never arrives at the fight!  That being said, no testing at all can be a little too agile.   And always...never deploy late on Friday unless you have no plans for the weekend.

    The three biggest mistakes in life...thinking that power = freedom, sex = love, and data = information.

  • I think the important thing is to reflect on the lessons learned and ask what we would do better with the benefit of hindsight.

    • Environment not available in the same state as production
    • UI test not in place

    The environment build should be automated so an AS LIVE environment exists as near as damn it

    The UI testing is not something I've done though I know Selenium used to be popular for this.

     

    The point is these are both addressable issues and in a no-blame culture these can be assigned priority appropriate to their level of risk.

  • IMHO wrote:

    In my experience, agility wins over perfection.  Mainly because perfection never arrives at the fight!  That being said, no testing at all can be a little too agile.   And always...never deploy late on Friday unless you have no plans for the weekend.

    I agree. A little agility, at the expense of less perfection, is fine. That's if we continue to improve over time and move closer to perfection. If we get to the "Eh good enough" too often, that is really bad over time.

    I hated Fri night deployments in the US, but I also understood them when we needed downtime. Slow time for many businesses over the weekend. I think the idea with DevOps is that we deploy early in the day, so that we can fix with a roll forward or roll back. That being said, pick a relatively slow time for the workload.

  • David.Poole wrote:

    I think the important thing is to reflect on the lessons learned and ask what we would do better with the benefit of hindsight.

    ...

    The point is these are both addressable issues and in a no-blame culture these can be assigned priority appropriate to their level of risk.

    Priority also based on cost/resources. I'm working on that latter part, because it's not just the risk and priority, but adding resources to better ensure these things are covered.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:

    David.Poole wrote:

    I think the important thing is to reflect on the lessons learned and ask what we would do better with the benefit of hindsight.

    ... The point is these are both addressable issues and in a no-blame culture these can be assigned priority appropriate to their level of risk.

    Priority also based on cost/resources. I'm working on that latter part, because it's not just the risk and priority, but adding resources to better ensure these things are covered.

    Heh... "Priority"... "Cost/Resources".  These are things that should be a part of the culture of what people are claiming to be DevOps.

    The best way to solve "Priority" issues is to not create issues by promoting bad code and breaking things that used to work.  Period.  That will also resolve "Cost/Resources" issues because you won't have unplanned for issues. 😉

    Before you get in a huff, yes, I agree that no one is perfect and that's also why you also need to plan for rollbacks.  Of course, the best rollback plans should never be needed but still have to be at the ready.

    A part of "DevOps" IS having a proper test environment.  You don't have one and that means that you're not a DevOps shop.  Sorry, but, period.

    I'm tickled that they finally fixed the issues that came about in the last several weeks (months?) and also understand the stress that it all caused.  Learn to avoid the stress by doing it right 99.9% right the first time and be at the ready with a plan for the 0.1% that goes wrong.  And, you folks haven't been.  Sorry, but, period.

    Even the first release of the new site was a complete joke.  Many of us tested the hell out of the new site at your request (and we WERE seriously happy and honored to do so) before the release and many of us compared notes afterwards.  Most of the faults and missing features that we cited were still released, right on bloody schedule :(.  It was a waste of our time and a waste of your developers' time.  The cite lost a lot of good, strong, members because of it.

    Adopt some of what I call the basics of development regardless of what too-cool-for-school term you apply to the SDLC.  Rule number one is do it right so you don't have to do it again, and again, and again.  It will also help keep you from getting a black eye by your customers.  It just doesn't take that much longer to do things right but it takes a hell of a lot longer to do things more than once.

    Rule number 2 is that you have to have a test environment that very, very closely resembles the production database in order to make Rule 1 actually happen.  You don't happen to know of a company that offers any database cloning software, DO YA? 😀

    Rule number 3... if management wants it real bad, that's the way they'll get it.  You been through this many times on this site and have seen many forum posts that cite the same thing.  Fight the schedule push if something is wrong or going wrong.  Heh... and only Rule 2 will tell you that.

    And, please... don't YOU take any of this personally.  You're not the one in control of any of this.  You're only the messenger (although an important, credible messenger) and I hope you take this message back to management.  This site isn't important just to the community... it's important to RedGate as a company.  It generates awareness of RedGate, has many trusted members like yourself, Grant, Kathi, Kendra, and more, and all of that helps generate revenue because... you're all motivated to "do it right".

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

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