My team has this one shared component that gets involved in like every feature’s development. This year, we’re loading like 5 different features onto it, all with different timelines, and my head’s about to explode trying to figure out how to make it all fly.
How does everyone else do their software releases? Do you freeze prod and then do one big release later? Throw everything into prod during dev, hope no one sees the unreleased stuff, and just announce it later? Or something else entirely?
Don’t you have some sort of staging?
Typically there should be at least one stage before prod that is entirely internal and where all the components get combined for the first time.
Otherwise, if a new feature is added, it should be done in a way, that doesn’t affect components that don’t use the feature (yet). Of course that’s not always possible, but should be the aspiration. In that case, you could deploy a new version without affecting any other services.
Yeah we have a test stage where everything is mixed together. It’s just that we directly promote that test stage to prod so we can’t really separate all the features back out for prod without cherry-picking. The other idea we came up with was just letting test flow to prod and locking WIP stuff behind feature flags. I don’t think the security people would like that idea very much though…
