For many organisations, the prospect of shifting from monthly or weekly releases to daily, sometimes hourly can be daunting. The long history of cost associated with releases in Saas businesses has left many with a bitter taste, associating more releases with more cost and risk. The good news is, things have changed and companies like Flux recognise that in order to do our best work, we need to be releasing little-often. There’s a few great reasons why shorter release cycles can support your business growth. We chatted to VP Architecture and Solutions, Simon Pohlen to understand more about this new way of working.
ADAPTABLE & FAST INNOVATION
In a world where agile is Queen, we know that releasing smaller updates often is going to deliver great long term innovation. Daily releases allow a significantly shorter feedback loop, this shortened loop provides the opportunity to detect bugs and discrepancies early, reducing risk for your business. It also allows for us to adapt and test new updates quickly and efficiently. In contrast, if you're releasing once a month, you will have to wait a significant amount of time to test a new hypothesis and be less reactive to changing priorities. This results in much shorter time frames and quick learning for your business, without a lengthy waterfall approach you’re able to test and learn fast, ultimately giving you the advantage over competitors who are moving slow.
HIGHLY SKILLED TEAM
A no-brainer benefit of daily releases, is that you’ll be relying on people with a higher skill in deploying releases, naturally the more often you do something the better you are at it. With releases becoming a BAU part of your daily operations, the team is well seasoned and far less likely to encounter issues they aren’t equipped to handle. When you put your releases in the hands of someone doing them far less often there is a greater risk of failure and it’s more often that issues arise.
BEST PRACTICE ENGINEERING
Daily releases encourage better engineering practices. As releases are more frequent, it allows for a test-driven development approach to be taken, ensuring that the team are working methodically and testing code as they go. This approach ensures a thoughtful and informed process from start to finish and leaves no room for sloppy engineering.
We’ve been working in a truly agile way for a decade now and have tightly refined the process of deploying updates to our platform, including shifting our largest client, Meridian Energy from monthly releases to feeling comfortable deploying daily.
If you’re interested in how this might look for your business or want some advice, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
