On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:04 PM, Juliusz Gonera jgonera@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I'm not a big fan of special highly orchestrated events when the whole team gathers and waits and then looks for regressions after deploying dozens of commits at the same time.
I don't know if this is true of other teams (I assume it's not), but this has been how the mobile team has been doing deployments. Some reasons for this are that we currently do not have automated tests, we need myriad device testing coverage, unexpected things have a tendency to go wrong only in production, the codebase is evolving very rapidly (even our weekly deployments can be rather larger and hairy), etc. We don't necessarily need all hands on deck for deployments, but it makes discovering regressions and debugging things that go sideways only in production a lot faster.
Is there any interest at WMF in taking this path at some point?
Once we have MobileFrontend working properly (in a production-like manner) on betalabs, we'll be a big step closer to this - particularly once betalabs is continuously updating to head of master for MobileFrontend. I believe a majority of the problems we find during MobileFrontend deployments would get caught during QA/testing in this environment.
I know the QA team has been talking about coordinating automated testing for mobile, but I'm not sure what the current status is - hopefully sooner rather than later ;)
Once these two pieces are in place, MobileFrontend deployments should be much less painful and require less focus from the entire team, and we'll be a stone's throw from the glorious future of continuous deployment :D