Exactly. All of our code requires two reviews (one from a lead if it’s to a shared environment), and deploying to production also requires approval of 3 people:
project manager
product owner
quality assurance
And it gets jointly verified immediately after deploy by QA and customer support/product owner. If we want an exception to our deploy rules (low QA pass rate, deploy within business hours, someone important is on leave, etc), we need the director to sign off.
We have <100 people total on the development org, probably closer to 50. We’re a relatively large company, but a relatively small tech team within a non-tech company (we manufacture stuff, and the SW is to support customers w/ our stuff).
I can’t imagine we’re too far outside the norms as far as big org deployments work. So that means that several people saw this change and decided it was fine. Or at least that’s what should happen with a multi-billion dollar company (much larger than ours).
No, separate groups. We basically have four separate, less-technical groups that are all involved in some way with the process of releasing stuff, and they all have their own motivations and whatnot:
PM - evaluated on consistency of releases, and keeping costs in line with expectations
PO - evaluated on delivering features customers want, and engagement with those features
QA - evaluated on bugs in production vs caught before release
support - evaluated on time to resolve customer complaints
devs - evaluated on reliability of estimates and consistency of work
PM, PO, and QA are involved in feature releases, PM, QA, and support are involved in hotfixes. Each tests in a staging environment before signing off, and tests again just after deploy.
It seems to work pretty well, and as a lead dev, I only need to interact with those groups at release and planning time. If I do my job properly, they’re all happy and releases are smooth (and they usually are). Each group has caught important issues, so I don’t think the redundancy is waste. The only overlap we have is our support lead has started contributing code changes (they cross-trained to FE dev), so they have another support member fill in when there’s a conflict of interest.
My industry has a pretty high cost for bad releases, since a high severity bug could cost customers millions per day, kind of like CrowdStrike, so I must assume they have a similar process for releases.
Exactly. All of our code requires two reviews (one from a lead if it’s to a shared environment), and deploying to production also requires approval of 3 people:
And it gets jointly verified immediately after deploy by QA and customer support/product owner. If we want an exception to our deploy rules (low QA pass rate, deploy within business hours, someone important is on leave, etc), we need the director to sign off.
We have <100 people total on the development org, probably closer to 50. We’re a relatively large company, but a relatively small tech team within a non-tech company (we manufacture stuff, and the SW is to support customers w/ our stuff).
I can’t imagine we’re too far outside the norms as far as big org deployments work. So that means that several people saw this change and decided it was fine. Or at least that’s what should happen with a multi-billion dollar company (much larger than ours).
Are “product” (PM, PO) and “engineering” (people who write the code) one and the same where you work? Or are they separate factions?
No, separate groups. We basically have four separate, less-technical groups that are all involved in some way with the process of releasing stuff, and they all have their own motivations and whatnot:
PM, PO, and QA are involved in feature releases, PM, QA, and support are involved in hotfixes. Each tests in a staging environment before signing off, and tests again just after deploy.
It seems to work pretty well, and as a lead dev, I only need to interact with those groups at release and planning time. If I do my job properly, they’re all happy and releases are smooth (and they usually are). Each group has caught important issues, so I don’t think the redundancy is waste. The only overlap we have is our support lead has started contributing code changes (they cross-trained to FE dev), so they have another support member fill in when there’s a conflict of interest.
My industry has a pretty high cost for bad releases, since a high severity bug could cost customers millions per day, kind of like CrowdStrike, so I must assume they have a similar process for releases.