Daily Deployment

One of the challenging practices in XP is daily deployment – it requires your development team to have a very low defect rate and completely automated build and deployment tools. In an off the shelf software scenario it has the additional challenge that you can’t actually get your customers to upgrade every day.

At Ephox we’ve adhered to this practice pretty well in the past by automatically deploying builds to all our internal systems, including our corporate wiki, website CMS and even this blog. Of course, that’s still just a small subset of the kind of environments that we’re actually used in and it’s not actually getting out to real customers. To take the next logical step, we need to make those builds available to any customers who feel like checking out what’s new – maybe not every day, but between all our customers hopefully regularly enough to give us good feedback.

So that’s what we’ve done with the EditLive! Early Access program on LiveWorks! If everything is going well and the engineers are actually working on EditLive! (they do like to go home on weekends) a new build should be automatically deployed to LiveWorks! twice a day ready for people to try out. We also include the current change log on the page (again, automatically updated) but at this stage we’re only listing changes from the last released version rather than every little change we make in the change log so it doesn’t necessarily show changes in every build. We might need to look into publishing commit logs as well in the future to work around that.

Personally, I think this is pretty exciting – there’s a lot of cool stuff that gets developed early in the release process that previously hasn’t seen the light of day until months later. Now it’s up on LiveWorks! within 12 hours.

As always, if you have any problems, suggestions random doodlings on the matter, comments are below, my contact details are just over there on the right and there’s also the LiveWorks! mailing list.