The last Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results shows that
the
more a developer ships the happier (s)he is.
Of course we see a huge
amount of people checking in multiple times a day, but also a large amount of
people checking in (so potentially building and deploying) much less than
that.
So, looking at the other side of the medal:
why aren’t you shipping
often?
Reasons – as usual – are varied. There might be process constraints
(certifications, etc.), hard requirements, but I’ve often seen a heavy reliance
on older deployment procedures which are considered too expensive to be
replaced by automation. Don’t touch what works, right?
Web applications are a stellar example of this. You might have the most
complex web app in the world, but why should you manually move stuff around when
you can pack everything in a MSDeploy package?
“
But that is for Azure and cloud technology and stuff!”
Wrong answer! MSDeploy is around since
2009
and it is well supported on-premise as well! So why aren’t you using it for your
existing application? It is, after all, the same concept Tomcat uses for its
.war files.
This isn’t about throwing years of valuable content in the sink. It is often
a matter of trying to split the larger problem into smaller components, and
approaching different delivery vehicles. You can retain your existing application
as-is, just replacing how you bring it into your production environments.
