| Refresh cycles in a mature development environment |
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| Written by Frotz | |
| Friday, 15 December 2006 | |
Mature development environments have a high inertia with respect to change. This article suggests tactics for influencing a development culture that doesn't care about your needs, but is also willing to stay seriously down-rev just because it is too much work to bring the environment current, or near current.Stale, Mature Development EnvironmentsIf you are in an environment that is mature and you find serious inertia due to the costs of full integration testing, you mightconsider a multi-month approach to bringing aspects of the environment up to date. SuggestionMake the statement that you are changing your particular environment as an experiment. Do the changes locally and prove the value-add of your environment improvements. Document fully how to take a standard development environment and how to update it to your new changed environment. If your prove the value-add of your environment changes, find an opportunity to update the shared development environment. Let this run for several weeks so that people get used to the fact that there are (or are not) significant differences / problems. Once you resolve any issues raised in the shared development environment, find the opportunity to update the shared staging environment if you have one. Again, let this soak for several weeks while people gain more confidence that your changes are benign and/or have a known impact. The fact that the shared development environment has already been updated means that the shared stage environment has the potential to be a simpler update. Again, let this soak for a while. Finally, get your changes into your production environments. the document you wrote early in this process will become very important as you probably won't have access to change the production environments, so you need to use each upgrade point to refine your document. Suggestion RequirementsYou must be willing to do the work. You must believe that your upgrades are worth the effort. |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 15 December 2006 ) |
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