Why Pre-holiday Update Deployment Is a Not Always a Good Idea: The Story of One Deploy

The pre-holiday time is the period of winter holidays with a very special atmosphere. For many people, this is a wonderful season, filled with laughter, joy, and meetings with family and friends. And for developers, it is loaded with many tasks that need to be completed by the end of the year and as soon as possible. Usually, many people go on vacation, and it becomes more and more difficult to meet deadlines. And to do everything on time, you need to allocate time effectively.

Therefore, today we will share some tips for effective time management. We will discuss when and how it would be better to set a deadline and why the idea of deploying a project at the end of the year sounds not so great.

Deadlines and Why It is Not Worth Putting Deadlines at the End of the Year?

At the turn of the year, software development teams have many tasks to complete to meet all deadlines. Projects are coming to an end; all processes need to be finalized. Since developers usually have a ton of work to do, there may have been some issues or challenges. They also cannot fulfill additional deadlines when time is worth its weight in gold, and you need to complete everything that has been planned. Since the projects’ timely development is critical, many companies just want the developers to do as much work as possible and as soon as possible. That is the primary reason why proper time management and scheduling are crucial if you want your business to succeed, have satisfied clients, have a high client retention rate, and obtain new ones.

So, why is it not worth putting deadlines at the end of the year?

• It is easy to make a mistake that can lead to serious issues
• Many developers booked a vacation for this period
• Businesses want that developers do many tasks as they can
• Because of many tasks, the developers cannot focus on the main tasks

In order to have a successful performance, thorough planning and scheduling are by far the most essential and principal aspects of the project management process.

How to Guide Time

It is recommended to utilize the ABCD method for effective time allocation. You need to create a priority list which can help reduce time and be more productive.

The ABCD approach divides all tasks into five groups using a priority matrix, forcing you to focus on important tasks and have your least important chores put off:

• A: First, finish the most impactful, critical tasks.
• B: Emails and other small activities should be completed after tasks marked with an A.
• C: Activities with no consequences if not completed — to be completed after A and B tasks are completed.
• D: Tasks to be deputed.
• E: Tasks to be excluded.

After you finish all the tasks, you should deploy the code, and it should be very simple to perform. The deployment is typically already automated, but occasionally and for unknown reasons, it may not be simple. The final step in the data process is another crucial element to implement. If you have already completed the work, simply click the button, and it will be uploaded to the server where your application, API, or other products that you are producing are launched.

Story of One Deploy

It was the end of the year, and the engineer’s duty was to launch the winter sale discounts. This is certainly a typical event in the industry when e-commerce starts planning new discounts for various items. Although it sounds simple, it required some effort in order to prevent any bugs. This project was a straightforward process with our kit as everything was automated. The developer just had to press a button to start the deployment process since everything worked perfectly.

Yet, after a few hours, the customer contacted the team and notified us that something went wrong and the application did not work properly. Following this, the developer responsible for the deployment began seeking assistance. The senior engineers were the only ones to contact. Since it was 1 a.m. on January 1st, it sounded like a crazy idea as everyone was celebrating.

However, at 2 a.m. two of the engineers started to help with resolving this problem. It turned out to be a rather small issue and actually something that happens quite often during the development/deployment process. When you miss a very small thing, it can turn into a very big problem. And that was our case.

The solution to this issue was as simple as reading the documentation before starting any process. To prevent significant issues, read the manual before getting down to a complicated or even not-so-complicated process. Before you press the button, put one small string to the deployment scripts and this problem would not even occur.

That’s basically one of the most common mistakes during the holiday season or any celebration period when everyone wants to complete their tasks very quickly, and for some reason, it is human nature sometimes to miss some rather minor things that eventually become a huge deal.

Summary

As you see, effective time management requires thorough planning at the earliest stages of project development. Once you plan the deadline so that it does not intertwine with the end of the year, you shall be fine. That time of the year is particularly stressful not only for the development teams but mainly for everyone. To avoid making mistakes, it is thus best to study the documentation, plan your time properly, and learn from the experiences of others. This will assist in preventing such occurrences in the future and will allow you to spend your holidays with your family and not in front of your laptop trying to fix some last-minute issue.

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