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blog:agile-_stress_testing_a_release_process [2012/05/18 19:27]
djo Discussion status changed
blog:agile-_stress_testing_a_release_process [2018/02/01 11:43]
djo
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 +====== Agile- stress testing a release process ======
 +
 +Sometimes you get on an airplane--or into a release process, and partway through the flight, something exciting happens.
 +
 +You never **want** this to happen, but sometimes it happens anyway. ​ And it becomes an opportunity to find out just how resilient your processes are.
 +
 +One time I was on the way between Chicago O'Hare and Los Angeles International,​ and suddenly the airplane hit a really big bump, the captain instantly turned on the "​Fasten Seatbelts"​ sign, and announced that we'd run into a bit of "​unexpected weather"​. ​ As it was night, and I had a window seat, I then had a fantastic view of the lightning flashing around us when I looked out the window and saw thunder clouds towering from far below us to high above us.
 +
 +This week, our agile team had the equivalent of the "​fasten seatbelts"​ sign come on when our team's build server went down 1 week before our ship date and just as we were entering the testing phase of our release process.  ​
 +
 +No worries, we thought. ​ We had prepared for this eventuality and simply moved the build to a backup machine while we waited for the primary machine to get the attention it needed to come back online.
 +
 +Then yesterday--one day before our scheduled ship date and the day we were scheduled to build our gold master release--the backup build server suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. ​ New machine needed. ​ We had a day to rebuild our machine from original software images and configuration files, build the release, perform our due and administrative diligence, and ship.
 +
 +However, being part of an extremely risk adverse organization,​ we had been forced by the organization several months ago to document all of our processes. ​ We had all of the build server configuration files backed up in SVN.  And we had the documentation we needed to quickly rebuild the server from scratch if we needed to.
 +
 +In an 8 hour day's work, two of our team members rebuilt the server. ​ Today, we built the gold release, did our due diligence, and shipped. ​ On time and on budget.
 +
 +Kudos to my manager and to all the team members who worked hard to implement the agile processes and documentation that made this possible. ​ This is truly one of the greatest teams I've had the privilege to serve on--but we couldn'​t have done it without the agile practices that we have implemented from day one: agile practices based on Scrum, but with lots of input from XP and Eclipse Way.
  
blog/agile-_stress_testing_a_release_process.txt ยท Last modified: 2018/02/01 11:43 by djo