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by wrath 4736 days ago
At my company I tend to think that we hire very competent developers. Our code base is so complicated (because of legacy code and/or the complexity of the tasks) that developers make mistakes all the time. They are caught by both a peer code-review process and the QA team or support/customers. I trust that you are "incredibly competent" but 1 mistake a month seems very low to me. But what do I know! :)

What type of product do you have? Do you have a QA team? Do you track new and close bug counts from week to week? Similarly do you track regression counts from build to build? Does the code base have a high completeness rate for unit tests? Do you only deploy if you pass the unit tests? What if you introduce a bug that screws up the data, do you have a fallback strategy?

I'm curious because I always had a dream to be able to deploy on a daily basis but I've never gotten there "yet". It's always nice to hear what others are doing for daily deployments.

1 comments

> I trust that you are "incredibly competent" but 1 mistake a month seems very low to me. But what do I know! :)

Honestly, I don't know where "incredibly" came from. I was going for pretty (pretty competent). I think my mind was in 2 places at once.

I have been working with the same code base for 2 years. I know it back to front. I am good at testing and my mind is open to the various scenarios which need to be tested for each change which is made. I make mistakes all the time but they very very very rarely sneak out and get live.

> What type of product do you have?

Its a website-as-a-service product.

> Do you have a QA team?

Nope. For major features we try to get all employee's to pitch in for a group test on a development server. That is the best we do. Minor features / fixes are just tested locally by the developer then go out.

> Do you track new and close bug counts from week to week?

We use bug tracking software. We track the amount of open bugs. When I started I was getting around 20 bugs / developer support requests a week. Now I get one or two. Most of what I get through the tracker is trouble shooting unfamiliar hosting configurations.

> Similarly do you track regression counts from build to build?

No

> Does the code base have a high completeness rate for unit tests?

The code base doesn't have unit tests. It was built by a hobbiest 4 years ago. The current version supports legacy features from a previous version. It is mainly procedural with a smattering of random classes. There is a lot of code duplication. It is the definition of spaghetti code.

Basically, the core software needs to be rewritten. This isn't a management priority so we make do.

> Do you only deploy if you pass the unit tests?

N/A

> What if you introduce a bug that screws up the data, do you have a fallback strategy?

We have twice daily backups and can rollback.