Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Kent Langley's '10 rules for launching a web site'

The advice in this blog post by Kent Langley resonates with my experiences launching Web infrastructures of all types, large and small. Deploy early and often, automate your deployments, use version control, create checklists, have a rollback plan -- these are all very sensible things to do.

I would add one more very important thing that seems to be missing from the list: have an extensive suite of automated tests to check that your deployment steps did the right thing. Many people just stop at the automation step, and don't go beyond that to the testing step. It will come back to haunt them in the long run. But this is fodder for another blog post, which will be coming real soon now ;-)

2 comments:

Paul Hildebrandt said...

Wait? Grig are you endorsing automated testing? Crazy!

Anonymous said...

Thank Grig. I would whole-heartedly agree with the automated testing suggestion. However, I've tried to bake this into projects time and time again only to be over-ruled by the developers, their bosses, or the clients themselves who did not want to pay for the effort up front. Shame.

I think they do not understand the hidden costs later. I explain, but it rarely resonates.

Kent

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