The Great Debate – Release or Deploy First?

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate and decision made about the lexicon we use to describe delivering value to customers and end users of our products. Most importantly, decoupling the words Release and Deploy is where we are starting to get some agreement in thought leadership between Agile and DevOps.

 

To sum up what thought leadership suggests is to say that Deployments should happen often all the way up to production and Releases will be on demand when the business wants them. Now that seems simple to understand, right? There’s no catch, either. What becomes important is understanding the cadence of deployment, feature toggling or branching strategies, and enabling the business to know when they should complete a release.

 

There is a Shu Ha Ri aspect of this too. For anyone unfamiliar with Shu Ha Ri, it’s the notion of maturity and mastery. So, organizations will be in all sorts of interesting points of maturity with the practices of deploying and releasing. Let’s decompose what these levels of maturity might be.

 

 

Now back to the debate – release or deploy first.  Hopefully the table helps you to understand more about why we want to decouple the terms.  We want to make releases business decisions that are not dependent on technical decisions or processes. And Deployments should be all about the technology and speed.

 

We’d love to hear your questions or comments about your progress below!