Release Management for Live Websites

When working with multiple larger Support-based contracts, "agile" can start to break down after the Implementation stage. Once a site goes live, often the project team will be adjusted, or sometimes it will change completely. Because of this, certain changes to the development workflow should be considered.

This session aims to inform you on technical nuances of a solid release process for ongoing development. Product and Project Managers, Developers, and other stakeholders will all benefit from understanding what goes on behind the curtain of what it takes to make changes to a live website.

What are the Dev, Stage, Live environments for anyway?

• How often do I deploy changes to each environment?
• What is a release cycle?
• What are these things?
  •  Merge conflicts
  •  cherry-picking
  •  branching
  •  integration/develop/master/staging branches
  •  release tagging
  •  hotfixes
  •  ...
• How can Continuous Integration and automated testing fit in?
• Benefits that can be leveraged using certain features of JIRA and Github/Bitbucket
• Working collaboratively with a team instead of "too many cooks"

This presentation covers the basic and advanced concepts of managing ongoing support of a live website and its ecosystem. It is for any website or project manager who has ever been confused by what's happening when changes to your site go live.