[zeruch]

Users seem more comfortable with predictable maintenance than arbitrary outages. Weekend deploys are just bad all around.

When I began in my current role (managing QA/DBAs and app deploys) one of the first things I killed was the late Friday/weekend deploys. They are spirit-crushing and if they go south, they usually go south in a terminal-velocity nose dive.

We set up early Fridays for maintenance, to give us enough time in case something goes south. Aggressive Change Control Requests means the people impacted get a heads up (including Account Managers, who in turn inform clients) if there are any user-facing impacts, and we avoid trying to pack too much in at once.

Having QA, Engineering and the SOC team on hand is...helpful. Maybe its paranoid, but its been very solid so far. When things have gone south, I think the events -since everyone is "on deck" have actually helped build some cameraderie in the teams themselves.

[vacri]

I seem to accrete job roles, and one time I was so far behind on my testing that I went to the boss to ask for a Wed-Sunday work week so I could get some actual work done without interruptions.

The first fortnight was great, got through a lot of backlog on sat/sun.

The second fortnight sucked as I was blocked on stupidly trivial issues. That ended the experiment.

I guess the moral of the story is to pick and choose your 'out of hours' work wisely.