5 posts tagged with "dark launch"

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, delivering high-quality software that meets user expectations is a formidable challenge. The journey from conceptualizing innovative features to their seamless integration into a live application involves careful consideration, testing, and risk management. One valuable tool that has emerged to address these challenges is the concept of dark launches. This strategic deployment technique allows development teams to introduce and test new software features with precision, unlocking controlled innovation and user-driven improvements. Let's further explore the concept of dark launches and what they offer to development teams.

As developers, we spend countless hours building new features and having them pass through rigorous QA tests. However, despite experience and all preparations made, there's always that dreaded feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you know it's time for deployment. What if something goes wrong in production and your feature doesn't function as expected?

In a traditional software development workflow, whenever there are updates or feature releases to be made, they are typically tied to a single major deployment to production. As a result, the frequency of feature delivery is slower and a lot riskier because there’s a lot more at stake with each deployment if things don't go as planned.

That is to say that releases should not be tied to deployments but rather, decoupled from them. Due to this reason, in a continuous delivery environment, it is considered best practice to decouple feature releases from deployments as it allows for more incremental releases.

Hence, understanding the concept of decoupling releases from deployment and how feature flags can make that possible is a key for any team.

Product managers are responsible for deciding what products to develop that align with the company's goals and also satisfy the needs of the customers. To be a successful product manager, you have to start by defining what a winning product looks like and iterate over it until it's right. To do so, you have to understand that at its core, a product is broken down into its features and quality of user experience.

However, when developing these features, even after thoroughly testing them in your development environment for potential bugs and issues that may negatively impact user experience, it may not always be sufficient to ensure a successful release to users.

Let me tell you a story about the myth of the Friday Release. Newbie QA guy was finishing up his tasks on a Friday evening after hours. The office was quite empty at that time, only a few people left.