Trigger-happy releases

Cal Henderson of Flickr: On a good day, we release a new version every half-an-hour. And I thought we had it beat with our once-a-day-releases…

We’re getting there at Revieworld, with releases every day. I’m most proud though that we could release every half-an-hour if we wanted to – continuous integration ensuring that checked-in code is always in a releaseable state. We’re currently running at a test-to-code ratio of around 1.4:1

I’m pleased to say that we’ve never had a release that we weren’t happy with and certainly not one we’ve had to rollback.

Two of my standard interview questions now are “how often did you release code on your last project?” and “what would you have to do to halve that time?” For anyone coming to interview soon, here’s a clue: the answer is never add more testers.