Lessons Learned From a Failed Release
Deploying and distributing software products that impress users involves many processes and principles that must be executed meticulously. Unfortunately, with so many people and processes involved, it is easy to make mistakes. Miscommunications between the engineering team and the product design team can lead to developers releasing a product that is not desirable. In addition, a release can fail due to inadequate testing.
In this article, I will share some of the lessons I have learned from experiencing failed releases and explain how to mitigate issues that cause them to fail.
Issues that Trigger Product Release Failure
There are many factors and mistakes that can contribute to the failure of a product release, leading to significant financial losses and reputational damage for the organization. Below are some of the issues that cause release failures:
Inadequate Testing
Without adequate testing, issues such as design flaws, vulnerabilities, and poor application performance will show up when the user uses your product. It’s better to extend a deadline than to deliver a product that flops and ruins the company’s reputation.
Having an assumption that code will always have bugs or errors is important. This puts you in a position to do extensive and thorough testing. It is quite common to do a few tests where you think bugs might be detected. But, testing less reduces testing coverage. What escalates the inadequate problem is that there are always strict deadlines for product releases. With less time left, developers tend to do less testing coverage trying to deliver the product on time.
Failing to Implement Feature Flags
Failing to implement feature flags is one fateful mistake that bites back when the release goes wrong. Implementing feature flags isn’t a difficult task when you use a feature flag management platform like Unleash.
Feature flags are important on-and-off switches. They enable you to switch off features that have bugs and insecurities if a release goes wrong. Feature flags reduce the impact of a failed release. They can even turn a failed release into a working release when the troublesome feature is turned off through feature flags. Without feature flags, deployment rollbacks are difficult.
Technical Debt Makes Release Failure Inevitable
Shortcuts, cheap, and inadequate solutions seem to be easy solutions and take less time to yield results. But, they are never long-term solutions. Failing to document and throw exceptions appropriately leads to poor communication and poor code. Below are more examples of technical debt:
- Hardcoded values and secrets
- Tight coupling makes many components interdependent and hard to make changes.
- Overly complex architecture
- Inflexible design patterns
- Insufficient integration or end-to-end tests
- Outdated dependencies and libraries
Refusing to use the best code solutions can never yield the best application. Technical debt is hard to eliminate as it stems from the application architecture. For it to be eliminated, many code components and objects have to be reviewed and changed.
Technical debt creates an environment where fixing code bugs and insecurities is hard. When the entire architecture is plagued with technical debt, release failures are inevitable.
Ignoring User Feedback
Falling into the trap of believing that customers want exactly what you think is the best is detrimental when releasing products. Customers have different perspectives and preferences, so listening to what they need is crucial.
Ignoring user feedback spirals into releasing a product that does not satisfy the customer’s needs and wants. Products are developed for specific users and those users know what needs to be done to make your product useful.
Failure to Scale Resources When User Base Grows
Achieving user base growth is great, but maintaining that growth rate is another task. Application usage rates change based on seasons and trends. Failing to scale up resources when the number of users doubles leads to the application crashing. When the number of users declines, resources have to be scaled down to reduce costs.
Lessons Learned From a Failed Release
Below are some of the lessons I learned from a failed release:
The Importance of Thorough Testing
Adequate testing can be done on a large scale if you choose the right frameworks and procedures. One of the best testing procedures that strengthens the shift left idea is the Test-Driven Development(TDD) procedure. The Test-Driven development procedure involves creating test units before coding. The test units created during test-driven development ensure that the code meets software requirements and design principles as the code will be corrected until it passes all the test cases. Below are the benefits of adopting the TDD procedure:
- The test-driven development procedure sharpens your understanding of the client’s requirements as tests are designed using client requirements.
- TDD improves your testing capability and efficiency as you will be focusing on testing one feature.
- TDD improves code maintainability and reusability as code that passes through the test-driven development procedure is well-optimized and well-arranged.
Prioritizing testing at the beginning of the project minimizes technical debt and ensures that every feature is well-tested and up to standard.
Realistic Planning and Scheduling
Deadlines are there to give you direction not to sabotage your projects. Deadlines need to have room for possible failure reroutes. A plan that has an outline for resolving failure is imperative. If your application is not delivered on time it is better to extend the deadline than to deliver a product that is not satisfactory.
It is also important to know that tight and strict deadlines put developers under intense pressure that creates fatigue and burnout. If the developers are burned there is a high chance that the review of the product that is about to be released will be less productive.
A realistic deadline not only gives you room to solvedoes not only give you room for solving mistakes, but it also ensures that the developers are in the right state to review and find small holes that can destroy your application.
Unleash provides tools for managing the entire lifecycle of a feature, from development to deprecation. Teams can plan feature rollouts, monitor usage, and eventually phase out features all within the same platform. Managing the sequence and priority of product releases is a significant difficulty in software development. This problem is solved by Unleash’s feature flag system, which helps teams to divide their release schedule into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Unleash makes feature scheduling a precise and regulated procedure, which is great for organizing the distribution of new features. Teams have the option to plan the slow rollout of features, making them available to users at predetermined intervals or progressively deploying the application to a set of users.
Small releases over big bang releases. Huge releases call for more reviews and tasks. It is easy to miss out on finding bugs. Big projects also have a high risk of lower testing coverage. It is always better to make small releases since they are easy to improve and manage.
If you are working on a big project, you can improve the project organization by using the Unleash feature management platform. Unleash provides tools for managing the entire lifecycle of a feature, from development to deprecation. Teams can plan feature rollouts, monitor usage, and eventually phase out features all within the same platform.
Managing the sequence and priority of product releases is a significant difficulty in software development. This problem is solved by Unleash’s feature flag system, which helps teams to divide their release schedule into smaller, more manageable feature releases.
Unleash makes feature scheduling a precise and regulated procedure, which is great for organizing the distribution of new features. Teams have the option to plan the slow rollout of features, making them available to users at predetermined intervals or progressively deploying the application to a set of users.
Effective Coding and Communication Strategies
Effective communication strategies are crucial for fostering understanding and building strong relationships with your teammates. Below are key good communication takeaways:
- Be open to constructive criticism and use it as an opportunity for improvement.
- Approach conflicts with a problem-solving mindset.
- Listen actively and ask questions to gain more clarity and understanding during product design meetings.
- Be clear and concise, and organize your thoughts and ideas logically using simple language.
By incorporating these effective communication strategies into your interactions, you can build stronger connections, enhance understanding, and achieve your desired outcomes more effectively.
Besides, person-to-person communication there is also good communication etiquette in coding. Debugging and code review become an ambiguous task when the program being reviewed is hard to read and important information is not added. Throwing an exception and not explaining what causes it in the comment section may delay the code review process. These are some of the habits that show bad communication. As you code keep in mind that someone else will review it and is important to communicate well by writing good comments,
Code documentation is a necessity. What you understand might not be understood by your fellow teammates. It is imperative to add descriptions and details on what your code does and what exceptions are thrown when an error occurs.
Mitigating Technical Debt
The best way to reduce technical debt is to implement technical assurance practices. Taking quality assurance seriously is important. Quality assurance minimizes release failure because it tests every aspect of the application that might fail. Applications are tested for high usage and various scenarios that are not expected.
Quality assurance also takes user feedback seriously and introduces a series of continuous improvements to make sure that the product satisfies the market. Product statistics and trends are also taken into consideration.
The only way to mitigate technical debt is to take your time and polish your application. Create a detailed timeline of how and when you will eliminate both old and new bugs. Properly wrapping your code changes that reduce technical debt in feature flags makes it easier to control the new code in case the new improvements fail. Ignoring bugs creates a pile of traps that will be hard to solve. Bugs should not be ignored just because they are not classified as severe. Low-impact bugs make a path for high-severity bugs.
Telemetry and Observation
Metrics are critical to making important decisions such as when to release a product and will the product be able to scale up and down whenever necessary. It is very important to monitor metrics such as resource metrics when deploying your application in testing environments. Telemetrics show you critical details such as resource usage, and failure rate.
Feature flag management platforms provide metrics and enable you to carry out A/B testing to learn how the new release compares to the previous release. Unleash enables you to connect event impression data from flag usage to other metrics tools such as Grafana to have a deeper insight that could help you mitigate issues faster or learn more about user behavior/experience.
Conclusion
The impacts of a product release failing can be devastating and draining. But, learning from your mistakes is important to prevent repeating the same mistakes. A release is successful when all processes involved in developing and deploying the products are tested thoroughly. To make things easier you should implement tools that help you communicate, design, code, and deploy securely. Unleash has a full list of feature flag best practices that can help guide you as you architect your solutions when building, deploying, and maintaining your code.
Automation and AI are here to do repetitive tasks that complicate the release process. There are rollout automation management platforms that offer canary release solutions such as Unleash segmentation. The canary release strategy mitigates release failure impact as you will release the application to a few number people before rolling it out to the rest of the user base.
