Friday 7 April 2017

“We don’t ship so often”: why? A reflection on Delivery hurdles.

The last Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results shows that the more a developer ships the happier (s)he is. 
Of course we see a huge amount of people checking in multiple times a day, but also a large amount of people checking in (so potentially building and deploying) much less than that.

So, looking at the other side of the medal: why aren’t you shipping often?

Reasons – as usual – are varied. There might be process constraints (certifications, etc.), hard requirements, but I’ve often seen a heavy reliance on older deployment procedures which are considered too expensive to be replaced by automation. Don’t touch what works, right?

Web applications are a stellar example of this. You might have the most complex web app in the world, but why should you manually move stuff around when you can pack everything in a MSDeploy package?

But that is for Azure and cloud technology and stuff!

Wrong answer! MSDeploy is around since 2009 and it is well supported on-premise as well! So why aren’t you using it for your existing application? It is, after all, the same concept Tomcat uses for its .war files.


This isn’t about throwing years of valuable content in the sink. It is often a matter of trying to split the larger problem into smaller components, and approaching different delivery vehicles. You can retain your existing application as-is, just replacing how you bring it into your production environments.

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