Iteration #2 - Day #-1 Tuesday 12/31/2002

Today we had a major deployment issue. It took 2 of us all day to find a strange set of "bugs" that were a result of not getting a couple of stored procedures into our dev and QA builds. Afterwards we all sat down to see how we could avoid this kind of thing in the future, especially for production releases. Here is what we came up with:

• Too many manual steps in build creation - look to tools such as NAnt.
• No automated smoke test after deployment - run unit and FIT tests.
• Hand editing of config files after deployment - place all environment specific files under version control and ensure build tool gets correct version.
• Lack of communication/coordination before build/deploy - schedule standup for build.