Imaginet Blog Series — Part 2
Mastering Your Deployment Pipeline
The Real Cost of Deployment
In the Part 1 in the series, we looked at some of the reasons why we might neglect the opportunity to nurture the build process and create an automated solution for deployment.
To really see why we should consider our build and deployment system as first class citizens on our development team, perhaps we should start by evaluating what it might cost to build them out.
Doing Things Manually
Knowing our costs, we can then determine if a one-button deployment helps mitigate risk and improve our ability to deliver. Now, we’ll speak in very general terms to be as inclusive as possible for all project types, but deploying an application as a third party or within your organization may look like the following:
- Building a deployment package
- Executing unit and acceptance tests
- Conducting any use-case centric testing to mitigate regression bugs
- Booking overtime for your staff to conduct the upgrade
- Requesting permission from your IT department or from your client to perform an upgrade during a window of time
- Backing up the existing deployment
- Creating restore points in the database
- Performing the upgrade and bringing the system back online
- Notifying stakeholders that the upgrade is complete
A Multitude of Costs
Now maybe, just maybe, you have a very devoted and efficient team. It is possible that you can do most or even all of these tasks in under two hours, plus some time for communication with the client. But even still there are likely other hidden costs, lost time, and distractions, and while it may only be two hours of time, how many employees are involved of yours? Of your clients? Could it be that those “two hours” are actually eight, or ten, or twelve? And if you have dozens of clients to deploy to, there is a multiplicity event in our calculations, and a single upgrade can now cost into the hundreds of hours.
Disaster Scenarios
And consider, then, a worst case scenario and a cost that you can’t measure directly: the discovery of a critical defect that must be patched during working hours. If it can take hours to get a build ready and deployed to a customer of yours that is waiting for a fix, that time will seem like an eternity and the loss of reputation may be difficult to recover from. This is true even more in a situation where downtime of a client has a direct impact on their ability to generate revenue.
Rounding Up
It would only take a moment in Excel to punch in those topics above and put some numbers beside each of them. Correlate those hours with your labor costs and you’ll quickly see how much it really costs to deploy your application manually.
In Part 3 of this series, we’ll break down some of the road blocks we presented in Part 1 and begin to talk about how getting past these points can open up new doors.
Mastering Your Deployment Pipeline
Need help mastering your deployment pipeline?
Imaginet can help! Contact Imaginet today for your free consultation call to openly discuss your deployment challenges and determine next steps towards mastering your deployments.
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