There are a few shops like Etsy that use continuous deployment/delivery to have code go straight into production, but otherwise the rest of us have some sort of environment between the developer’s machine and the live production environment.  Some call this Staging or QA, or there may actually be MANY of these environments that a build needs to be promoted through before it is pushed to production.  We’ve all seen this, we’ve all had to go through “deployment day”, and we’ve all hated it.

Whether you run agile/lean or waterfall, this idea of acceptance environments is the same.  However, for some reason, these environments only seem to get updated at “critical milestones” on projects.  In a waterfall pattern, this makes sense.  You finish your work, you pass it to the next environment and let it continue its path.  However, why do so many agile teams not push through these environments every iteration? Why are we pushing to acceptance environments so late in our projects?

Perhaps it is because we have embedded QA on our teams during the iteration and believe that everything is ready for production by the end of the iteration so we don’t need to worry about testing in all the various environments. We’ve already done our testing, so why do it again? Doesn’t that seem more like a waterfall testing approach? Absolutely not, and here’s why:

Continue reading “4 reasons why agile teams should stage deployments each iteration” →