Transform your risky production deployments into a smooth, reliable process. Learn from 5+ years of continuously improving the release flow for a platform handling 40+ sites.

Prerequisite
Attendees should possess a general understanding of Quality Assurance / Development principles and the typical web platform release lifecycle.

Outline
This session chronicles a 5+ year journey of refining the production deployment process for a complex Drupal web platform serving 40+ international websites. Facing challenges with parallel platform versions (old vs. new) and intricate dependencies, our team iteratively improved the final, critical stage: releasing to production.

We will cover:

- The Initial Chaos: Understanding the starting point – challenges, risks, and pain points of the early release process.

- Evolution & Key Milestones: Tracing how the process changed over time, including lessons learned during major platform rebuilds.

- Concrete Improvements: Sharing specific strategies, tools, and communication protocols implemented for pre-deployment checks, automated testing integration, safer deployment steps, effective rollback procedures, and post-deployment monitoring.

- Team Collaboration: Highlighting how QA, Dev, and Ops worked together to build confidence and reliability.

- Future-Proofing with AI: Exploring potential applications of AI tools to further enhance testing, analyze deployment outcomes, predict risks, and elevate QA's role in the release cycle.

Join us to learn from our experience and discover practical ways to mature your own Drupal deployment workflows.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

- Identify common pitfalls and challenges in complex Drupal production deployment scenarios.

- Understand strategies for iteratively improving release processes over time, even during platform migrations or rebuilds.

- Learn specific, practical techniques for enhancing pre-deployment validation, deployment execution, and post-release monitoring.

- Appreciate the importance of cross-functional team collaboration (QA, Dev, Ops) in ensuring release success.

- Recognize opportunities to leverage emerging AI technologies to augment QA practices and further optimize release workflows.

Experience level
Intermediate