Delinking releases and deployments

Releases for application development used to be a big event during my early career stages. There were multiple cycles of QA, UAT and business acceptance before deployment happens. The deployment also had lots of complexities as the dev environment and production environment were differently configured and surprises were the norm. The entire last week of a project usually was called a release and people used to keep their fingers crossed, monitor things round the clock for few days before beating their drums.

Fast forward to now, a release is a non event for us. We constantly deploy our code to production with the features hidden behind a toggle. We use Recruiterbox for hiring, so we are always our first client. The features are made available to internal clients, then our pioneer customers (who have expressed interest in early access to new features) and then to all our customers. The release is so much of a non event that it is similar to cutting the ribbon and opening a newly built bridge for traffic. There is no margin for surprise by the time we release, it is yet another day in our daily life.

Originally published at inside.recruiterbox.com on May 4, 2016.