Comments on: Is Continuous Deployment Good for Users?

By: Joseph Enright

Joseph Enright — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:24:18 +0000

It is clear that you are not speaking of large complex industrial software such as factory automation software or in fact any production critical software or mention mission critical Software such as a CAT scanner or avionics. Imagine the chaos that would occur if software was dynamaically donloaded to a cisco core router that didnt take in the account the impact on other non upgraded routers

By: Onederer

Onederer — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:12:10 +0000

If anyone gets frustrated waiting for updates and fixes, there is another solution. Try Linux! After all, it’s free, the updates come automatically when they are ready for usage. OS error corrections can be made in sometimes the same day, or in just a couple of days. Quite a lot faster than MS. Linux doesn’t have to go through the bureaucratic layers that happens in MS to get things done. It is not subject to viruses, and malware. And the stability of the OS is great. A great pletora of various applications are available. And they are all free! In most cases with MS, you have to buy extra applications that you may need. Since I’ve been running Linux and FreeBSD, I’ve never had to cope with malicious attacks, and viruses, and trojans.

Oh, and when an application is downloaded and installed, one doesn’t have to reboot to get it going. Simply install and keep on doing your thing.

There are all kinds of flavors of Linux. Somewhere out there,there is one version that will fully suit your needs. If you need something for laptops, I’d recommend PCLinuxOS, or DesktopBSD. Those two OS’s have a great and easy GUI wireless application to use. I can set it up 5 minutes.

Of course if you are not yet sure that you want to stick with Linux, and you still want to keep your Windows in the background (just in case), Linux has a great boot-loader manager, called GRUB. With that, you can dual boot to either of the OS’s, either in separate hard drives, or both in the same hard drive.

I’m simply happy to announce that there are more choices than just being a slave to an expensive closed source OS. And Linux doesn’t weight you down with costly licenses. One copy can be installed in as many machines as your heart desires. Linux and BSD Unix are both open source systems. You get all the tools needed to make the changes to suit your requirements.

Happy Computing!

By: Jak

Jak — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:06:25 +0000

Your comments about switching to the Mac are specious, most of your customers on the PC, so get used to it.

By: Mr. Huddle: The Easiest Way To Keep Up With Your Communities

Mr. Huddle: The Easiest Way To Keep Up With Your Communities — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:07:01 +0000

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By: Laura Klein

Laura Klein — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:21:17 +0000

Thanks for the comments! William, you make a great point that pushing code doesn’t always have to have a visible impact on all users. Making an investment, like YouTube does, in tools that allow you to have good control over who sees what when will go a long way toward making sure that continuous deployment doesn’t have a negative impact on your customers.

Thanks again!

By: Mia Silverman

Mia Silverman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:49:39 +0000

Great post! One more personal example that comes to mind of a product with too many frequent download/update requests is Adobe. Their “updater” appears constantly on my computer– to the point that I’m always irritated when I see it and think it hurts their brand.

By: William Pietri

William Pietri — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:03:18 +0000

Great article!

I think one of the problems people have in thinking about continuous deployment is that they confuse pushing code with releasing features.

There’s no particular reason releasing new code to your servers has to coincide with making new features visible to users. Indeed, if you’re already doing A/B testing, it’s a short technical step to create an interface for product managers to turn features on, off, or various states in between.

One good example is YouTube. They strongly value a good user experience, but they also need to innovate rapidly. So every new feature goes out into fractional release, with only a small percentage of users seeing it at first. If there are big problems, the feature is switched off. More likely, the feature is tweaked based on use data and user testing until it’s ready for prime time, at which point they turn the dial up to full availability, with no code push needed. Eventually, as with finished A/B tests, engineers remove the extra code and the feature becomes just another part of the system.

As far as testing goes, I think the right answer is heavy investment in automated testing, combined with the continuous on-team presence of exploratory testers and product managers. For anybody who needs to keep innovating, there’s no economic case for long-term manual QA.