Part of the Process

One hot topic that you often get when you have project teams delivering functionality for user acceptance testing while support are testing ad hoc fixes for production issues is "Who owns the environment and how do we stop support and project work from interfering with each other?". I feel that all code changes and deployments to customer facing sites should have some kind of change management paperwork raised. Because of this you are able to catch scheduling/work conflicts in the change advisory board. A good change control process should help you think about the risk to your project and also help flag to other stakeholders that they might have a risk to consider. A very basic rule of thumb for deploying anything to production in a manually controlled environment is don't expect that no other changes to have been made since you took your base to work on and always check before merging in . Here I think a "manually controlled environment" is somewhere that d...

It's been a while since I've written up a work orientated blog post. At the moment two (relatively ;) exciting things are happening. One is the introduction of JIRA, Confluence and GreenHopper and the other is working on a series of projects to upgrade customers, getting them onto the latest version of our company's main product. I'm working along the lines of getting three categories of info in JIRA/confluence: 1.        Jira work items 2.        Confluence (upgrade) project wiki 3.        Confluence wiki page per customer The first item should be quite straight forward and contains information needed for the life time of that work and a point in time record of the system (i.e. what was the state of play when the JIRA was raised/worked on?). For example, a story on a feature has the handover documentation for the original implementation attached as word files, so the current st...