Deploy Coordination Tool?

Question

My company maintains a SaaS platform and we're approaching a pretty major release. Deploy night activities involve a large cross-functional team spanning several Development & QA groups, Operations, Professional Services, and Customer Support.

We've always used a simple task-list and a chatroom to coordinate all the work to be done during our release window, but as our releases become larger and more complex it has become difficult to manage the scheduling and interdependencies of so many tasks and people. Often times things take longer than planned, and this effects other downstream activities which are to occur later by different groups. This can lead to much confusion during the deploy, and we'd really like to improve our practices.

Is anyone aware of a real time collaborative tool which supports such coordination activities? Perhaps people have had better experiences with other strategies altogether?

Answer 1

We too have a complex deployment and I think we also may be in need of simplifying the process prior to finding a tool. It's like a recent lifehacker post about organizing what you have prior to buying more organization tools like little plastic hanging folders and the like. Reduce/Rethink/Redesign prior implementation should mean a cleaner easier process that could make due with simple deployment tools like rpm.

I think step one is for us to rethink the process from the base goals onward and to push hard on each requirement with the question: what-does-that-buy-us?

If there's no payoff for a step in clarity, risk reduction or basic functionality, then it doesn't need to be in the process any more.

At least, that's how I've been approaching problems here with some success.

Answer 2

My experience in the past: - few larger releases per year -- too much effort to coordinate, too many days between dev complete to release, and completely ruin your time to market.

• then we tried more small releases per year -- much better approach. more things to manage; but, size of each release is nicely defined. this also, eliminates the need for having a separate process to release bug fixes Vs features.

• here is how the tools came in handy: clarity maintains the features/bug fixes that need to be released, these map to components that need to build, components that are built defines what packages need to be pushed in the release.