No deployments on Fridays: A good practice for software development teams • Hacker News Board

Re: No deployments on Fridays: A good practice for software development teams

#31

Post by jononor » Thu, Mar 07, 2024, 7:14 PM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #10

Here is a different story from another perspective of a niche group of team. I led a few teams — small groups for each project. I realized that quite a few of the team have a strange habit of deploying around 5-6PM on Fridays! What I found out was interesting. They were young, single, and don’t really seem to be those looking out to go to bars, etc. By deploying late, and staying over-time — the company’s rule of “co…

Haha, that is most excellent detective work. Always deploy on Fridays, and enjoy the perks is also a valid strategy I guess :D

Re: No deployments on Fridays: A good practice for software development teams

#32

Post by blackoil » Thu, Mar 07, 2024, 7:53 PM UTC

sponaugle wrote: post #5

"Reduces stress: Deploying new code to production can be a stressful experience, especially if it's done at the end of the week. By following a "no deployments on Fridays" policy, teams can reduce their stress levels and focus on other tasks." It would seem more valuable to instead put efforts to make code deploys less 'stressful'. If you are regularly deploying code and causing huge stress you are doing something el…

You can strive to reduce stress but may not be able to bring it to 0.

Like you should have for extinguishers even if all precautions have been taken to prevent fire.

Re: No deployments on Fridays: A good practice for software development teams

#33

Post by higeorge13 » Thu, Mar 07, 2024, 9:04 PM UTC

I have read in some other post that it’s not about the on-call and development overhead, but the potential operational burden to the company or its customers. What about some bad algorithm which causes millions of dollars in revenue or something blocking your customers over the weekend? Who is going to fix this kind of issues during the weekend? It’s better to deploy on Sundays then.

Re: No deployments on Fridays: A good practice for software development teams

#34

Post by semi » Fri, Mar 08, 2024, 7:29 PM UTC

PretzelPirate wrote: post #11

StayTrue wrote: post #9

This article doesn’t come right out and say it but repeatedly suggests working on the weekend is the core problem. I like Friday releases because I don’t care about working weekends. In my mind slower uptake from weekend users can help identify problems before major uptake Monday morning. Although that’s theoretical because it hasn’t mattered in practice.

> I don’t care about working weekends. This seems like a take I don't hear often. I won't work on a weekend unless the service is on fire and I'm the only one who can save it (which means I've done a bad job). I'm fine with Friday deployments as long as we have a good release pipeline with multiple stages of validation and slow rollout, but if I see that my team is having to regularly work weekends because we deploy…

It really depends on a lot imo.

If you still get days off it can be nice to have them during most peoples work week so you can get errands done easily. As long as it's not consistently every weekend so you can still do weekend things with other people.

It can also be easier to get stuff done on the weekend when most other people/distractions aren't around.

I actually am really happy with how my current team works, where you will be on call during the weekend but only expected to respond to pages so usually you just need to be able to respond and not actually working.. if lots of things page it's even more incentive to improve your systems to not get bugged on the weekend. But even if nothing pages you we still take two days of our choice off the next week.