Deploying software every day is... actually... OK – what devs tell their real-life friends

Multiple deploys a day? I'd hate to be a custom of one of those companies!

Fixing bugs is important but so to a great many people is stability. How many of those deploys are required to fix a problem caused by a previous deploy earlier in the day because it wasn't adequately tested? Oh testing, that something someone else does, devops are too cool for PROPER testing...

Less haste, more speed.

Practive What You Preach?

So, the report, produced by Puppet, says that low performers are those achieving a deployment between once a month and once every six months.

This is from a company that has released two versions of Puppet Enterprise since the start of the year.

If releasing every day is such a good idea for production software, why don't they do it?

"One possible explanation is that low performers ignore critical rework so they can push new features, but it’s highly likely this is at the expense of racking up technical debt.”

Or maybe they are actually sorting the bugs out and doing proper testing and not introducing new bugs.

Redefining failures as success

Multiple deployments a day? Why is this necessary unless previous deployments had significant issues? How is this more efficient especially when taking into account knock on effects on the users of a constantly shifting software environment. What sort of level of thought is going onto what features make sense, how they inetract, work flow, usability ?

This sort of frenetic pace is the mark of failure and mass organisational delusion.

I'm that guy

tl;dr, made fapping motion after first paragraph, disappointed enough to waste valuable work time (hahaha) to post complaint. Is it Friday yet?

More DevOps Bollocks

Meanwhile, the whole point of computers is scale - do it once, properly, and the machine will do all the rest. Here in the real world, bollocks to ongoing deployments; I sit quietly at home, writing stuff in a leisurely fashion which somehow is currently processing billions of records every day in a goodly chunk of the world's major enterprises (sometimes a slightly scary thought). I guess DevOps is the current "Silver Bullet" (pace Fred Brookes).

Could have confirmed this years ago. Low rate workers and a few high rate workers always get praise and rehired. It's the rest that struggle and don't realise it's not the quality of their work that matters that get a raw deal.

High performing companies perform better than bad ones

Another "If we sort companies by performance, we find that the best ones perform far better than the worst ones using the the same metric ( eg power law distribution)" tautology based article?

How about making a nontrivial predictive statistical inference and showing other possibly confounding factors... For example, firmware, vs systems vs web are entirely different beasts.

Daily deployments?

I can see a problem doing daily deployments with safety-critical software that must be certified every time it is released. Mission critical could be a problem too. At Telstra's Australian EFTPOS network, we were not allowed to deploy any new software at all in December and January, our busiest time of the year.

Can't be bothered with bugs

Everyone wants to do "new feature" work and no one wants to be a maintenance coder.

We have some packages that are updated weekly. The developers can't be bothered looking at reported bugs in the system. You raise a bug report, no one gets assigned to look at it. 6 months later they ask if you are still having the problem (usually at Pub'O'Clock on a Friday) and when you don't get back to them over the weekend they automatically close the ticket.

Request (sorry, 'story'): DevOps flag on articles?

Please, please, please, El Reg, can you start clearly marking all DevOps puff pieces with DevOps in bold at the start of the heading? that way anyone who actually knows the slightest thing about development in the real world knows that they can ignore that article because it's just another press release from Puppet rewritten as if it was a Reg article.

Puppet are obviously practicing wheat they preach though, seeing as how they bang out a new 'release' every time they change a bit of punctuation (and The Reg dutifully copies it out and puts it up as 'news').

Thank you, carry on.

Win2003 and other legacy OS's

There was no indication whether those organisations running a 13-year-old operating system were high, medium or low performers.

Clearly, given the basis of the report and it's criteria for low, medium and high performance, they will be among the low performers since they won't be pushing updates to these systems unless MS are still providing support for Win2000 for those willing to pay...