Learning Launch - Follow the Sun Deploys

The Challenge:  Currently, I work as a Release Manager for my organization. We have a collaboration software  that helps drive work forward. In my organization we believe in quick iteration, fast feedback  loops, and responsiveness to customer feedback. To add to this we also have a number of  Engineers who were suffering given that our deploys were not reliable causing frustrations  and  a decline in productivity. . With these values and issues in mind I was given the  challenge of  refining our deployment system towards continuous integration and deployment so that we can  release more frequently but focussing on reliability and safety.   The project team includes the Developer Productivity/Internal Tools teams. The scope of work is  estimated to take about two sprints (4 weeks) to complete.   With our approach being very manual we are very dependent on humans deploying the latest  version of our software which  makes our deploys error prone and slow.   To add to this issue, we have Deploy Commanders in the East Coast that are burdened by  these manual deploys as well. As part of this launch we will focus on understanding our key  stakeholder’s (deploy commanders and engineers) needs  and how we can make deploys more  safe, reliable and fast.      Selection:  After carefully looking at our problem the team has decided to use ​Learning Launch​ tool to  introduce an experiment with our deploy commanders to quickly test our idea/proposal of “follow  the sun deploys”       Application:  As part of our first learning launch, we focused on introducing a regular deploy cadence starting  Monday through Friday. We introduced a rotation where we would do about 12 scheduled  deploys. During each deploy, an engineer is designated as the deploy commander in charge of  rolling out the new build to production. Having this regular cadence would introduce the  reliability the engineers found productive and it also gave us the safety we required. As part of  this experiment we included Deploy Commander training as part of our new Engineer  Onboarding.    Secondly, after we saw the success of the deploy rotation as part of the second experiment we  started introducing these shifts in other timezones such as Pune, Melbourne and Dublin.  As we rolled these experiments out we regularly sent out engineering effectiveness surveys to  get  quick feedback on the new deploy process.

Insight:  By applying this tool and conducting these experiments we gained insight into the thought that  even though these deploy shifts relieved the concerns of a few engineers, most of them  expressed their desire for complete automation of the deploy process. As anticipated  introducing these shifts across various timezones proved to be extremely beneficial by providing  complete coverage through the 24 hour period and hence we ended up calling this our “follow  the sun experiment”.  Having these additional shift also eased the burden on our East Coast Engineers.  We are continuing to include various mechanisms to take. us to our final goal of completely  eliminating Deploy Commanders and having the entire release process automated.      Approach:  Our team is continuing to use this approach to introduce tiny experiments across the various  deploy processes to see where we can eliminate manual intervention. This has allowed us to fail  fast, pivot and gain the quick feedback/insight we require from our stakeholders/customers.

