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I stumbled across this quote from Tim O'Reilly yesterday:
...web applications are not released in one to three year cycles. They are updated every day, sometimes every hour. Rather than being finished paintings, they are sketches, continually being redrawn in response to new data.
I cannot disagree more. Web sites and 'Web 2.0' scripted applications might get updated on an hourly basis, but real web applications have the same release cycle as desktop application, only the deployment mechanism is different.
At work, we have staggered release cycles. A maintenance release is deployed on a weekly basis that contains critical bug fixes and minor feature changes.
A small project release is done on a monthly basis, this contains feature changes to the application, but only changes that can be handled end-to-end (Requirement to test/deploy) in one month cycle.
Finally, we have large projects that have quarterly release time tables. These are often dependent on other SoA applications in our architecture and must be bundled into a large quarterly release across the enterprise..
A release (even a maintenance release), involves the coordination of Project Managers, Developers, QA, and Production Support. The end to end process is impacted by dozens of people.
We have to account for Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance and have a complete audit trail at all times. Getting an emergency approval to fix an urgent issue requires sign-offs all the way up the corporate ladder.
I'd imagine that this process is similar on any large public facing publicly traded company. To see someone such as O'Reilly make the distinction that web applications are just a FTP site to throw files onto is ludicrous.
Even Google, with its ubiquitous never ending betas and reputation for agility has release management cycles and SOX compliance rules to follow.
Posted by Jonathan Holland on 1/27/2009.
Tags: Opinion Regulations