Beyond “separating deployment from release”

Jason Yip
Apr 11, 2024

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Technical deployment to 100% release
  1. Technical deployment. Detect any obvious technical problems.
  2. Employee-only release. Detect any obvious product problems. Easier to do with business-to-consumer (B2C) products, harder to do with business-to-business (B2B) products depending on your level of domain expertise.
  3. Public release to “1%”. I put 1% in quotes because it’s really answering, “What is the minimum # of, and/or specific, users needed to detect whether there are obvious product problems?”
  4. Scale up incrementally toward 100% release. Detect problems that only show up with larger scale. May roll back to lower % due to detecting scaling problems. May abandon if you learn that the likely impact is not worth scaling to 100%.
  5. 100% release.

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Jason Yip

Senior Manager Product Engineering at Grainger. Extreme Programming, Agile, Lean guy. Ex-Spotify, ex-ThoughtWorks, ex-CruiseControl