How to communicate within a company what is being Continually Deployed
- by Francis Spor
I work for a small development company, 20 people total in the entire company, 3 in actual development, and we've adopted CD for our commits to trunk, and it works great, from a code management and up-time side. However - we're getting flak from our support staff and marketing department that they don't feel that they're getting enough lead time on new features and notifications on bug fixes that could change behavior. Part of why we love the CD system is for us in development, it's fast, we fix the bug, add the quick feature, close the Bugz and move on with our day to the next item.
All members of our company are now on HipChat at all times, and when a deployment occurs, a message is sent to a room that all company members are in, letting them know what was just deployed (it just shows the commit messages from tip back to the last recorded deployment). We in development are also attempting to make sure that when we're making a change that modifies the UI or a public facing behavior, we post a screenshot to the All Company room and explain what the behavior change is, seeking pushback or concerns. Often, the response is silence. Sometimes, it's a few minor questions, but nothing that need stop the deployment from happening.
What I'm wondering is how do other users of the CD method deal with notifications of new features and changes to areas of the company that are not development - and eventually on to customers in the world?
Thanks,
Francis
