release-management

What sort of info would go into good deployment documentation?

I have these constant battles with my colleagues regarding composition of deployment documentation. Everyone agrees that the documentation is necessary. Not everyone can find common ground on what level of detail should go into this especially differentiating between large releases, bug-fixes and enhancements. What have you found wor...

iPhone - dealloc - Release vs. nil

Wondering if someone with experience could possibly explain this a bit more. I have seen examples of... [view release]; view = nil; ....inside the (void) dealloc. What is the difference and is one better then the other? What is the best way? When doing retainCount testing I have personally seen nil drop a count from 3 to 0 for me...

Tracking DB changes with Zend Framework?

I am trying to decide between the Zend Framework and Ruby On Rails for my web application. If I go with ZF, I need the following: A way to incrementally track changes to my database, as with RoR's migration feature (001_something.sql, 002_something_else.sql). A place to put SQL for the next release of my software. At work in our custo...

What are common practices for deployment of large scale systems?

Given a large scale software project with several components written in different languages, configuration files, configuration scripts, environment settings and database migration scripts - what are the common practices for deployment to production? What are the difficulties to consider? Can the process be simplified with tools like An...

Python Pypi: what is your process for releasing packages for different Python versions? (Linux)

I've got several eggs I maintain on Pypi but up until now I've always focused on Python 2.5x. I'd like to release my eggs under both Python 2.5 & Python 2.6 in an automated fashion i.e. running tests generating doc preparing eggs uploading to Pypi How do you guys achieve this? A related question: how do I tag an egg to be "version ...

Versioning for a maven project with small, very frequent releases

I'm converting an ant project to a maven one. This project differs from the ones I've usually converted since it has very frequent releases, typically 8-10 times per day. By release I mean that the resulting jar is packaged and included in the production enviroment. This project is a leaf one, so it publishes no API, it only consumes it...

How to track version changes to dependent components/libraries?

We have a project that has several components developed independently. Yet we have many releases all named as different products with different schedules. We want to get immediate feedback when a component has a new version (probably related with a bug-fix), thus all products depending on that version to be updated as well. A -> v1.0 (r...

Release/Change management - best aproach

What is the better way to work with release management? More specifically what would be the best way to release packages? For example, assuming that you have a relatively stable system, a good quality assurance process (QA), etc. How do you prefer to release new versions? I have a tendency to prefer to do this by releasing packets at r...

Migrating to maven from an unusual svn directory structure?

Contrary to a 'normal' svn directory structure I'm using the following structure: trunk/ project1/ project2/ project3/ ... branches/ project1-branch/ project1/ project2/ ... project2-branch/ project1/ project2/ ... tags/ project1/ V1 V2 ... As you see I don't have separate triples (tr...

WebSite Deployment Skills

We need to increase our knowledge on deployment of ASP.NET Web sites/Web App. We are getting increasingly bigger and more traffic and need a more professional approach. Not too mention, we are also moving up to multiple database/multiple back end/ multiple front end server deployments and we just don't want to screw it up. What type of ...

What's the right way to manage a release with SVN?

My last employer had developed an elaborate system which sat on top of SVN to deal with ongoing development: (change management) look at bugs/issues and associate them with commits when making the commit by tagging the bug id number and (release management) tag items in SVN as part of a specific release based on the bug/issue tracking sy...

Distinguishing development mode and release mode environment settings on Android

I'm building an Android application and would like to maintain a few environment variables that I can tweak depending on whether I'm in development mode or release mode. For example, I need to invoke a web service and the URL will be slightly different in either mode. I'd like to externalize this and other settings so I can change them ...

Archivable, replicable releases when building with Maven: is there a right way?

We have a largish standalone (i.e. not Java EE) commercial Java project (10,000+ classes, four or five SVN repositories, ten or twenty third-party libraries) that's in the process of switching over to Maven. Unfortunately only one engineer (in a team of a dozen or so distributed across three countries) has any prior Maven experience, so ...

Release documentation - What all documents?

I am supposed to manage the software release process for a product release scheduled this month. Somehow, I couldn't find a good release guide for the different kinds of documentation involved in a product release. The best I could think of at the moment are: Release notes User manuals Installation document Are there any other docum...

What informations to collect during a new release

This is more of a project related query.. What ideally should I ask from a developer when he approaches me to sanction a new release? Are there any ready made formats that you all are following? Like .. List of New Fetures, Upgradations & Bug Fixes | TRAC/BugZilla ticket # Why you feel a New Release is required? List of DB / Table / ...

How can I track and synchronize releases between products and components

I found an odd situation at work and I'm trying to figure out where to start with a solution. We have a custom hardware/software device which contains multiple boards, each with their own function and flavor of software (CPLD, bootloader, application, etc). Additionally, the device interacts with a specific web app and a PC application...

SVN - How to handle one project, two kinds of releases, with the only difference one has several additional files

I think one method is keep one code base, when export, manually add or not add these additional files per release requirement. But it require you to remember doing this each time export a copy, which is easy to forget. I created a branch for the project in SVN with these files included, but problem is each time i change the trunk, i nee...

One-way Branching and Merging in TFS

The project I'm working on includes two what I'll call Libraries of code developed by other teams. Using TFS, we would simply include their TFS folders in our workspaces and include their Visual Studio projects in our solution files. If the other team checked-in a file to the libraries we would immediately get their changes. Obviously y...

SVN : Documentation also on a branch?

I follow a dev=trunk release=branch convention. this works great for the source code but what do ppl do for the documentation (unfortunately it is in MS Word (LaTex is too much for our corporate business/system analysts). do you also keep docs on a branch and merge (it is a pain) after release? or do you keep docs only on trunk? ...

SVN: Release branch and externals?

Hi All, We have two websites for the same client (main www site and another for the ecommerce site which sits on a seperate server) that use shared portion of code (various features/styles/javascript etc.). We currently manage this by having the shared code as seperate projects (in the same repos) in SVN and using svn:externals to pull ...