I am not a morning person. My daughter is also not a morning person.
This makes for some interesting mornings as she gets ready for school, and I get ready for work. We always get up with what seems like enough time to get ready and out the door 'on time', but more often than not we end up later than I'd like.
There's always something that comes up; hair takes longer than expected to brush, glasses aren't cleaned well enough, can't find the perfect plush 'lovey' to take, forgot to print parking permits. Some of those are her's and some are mine. I'm not telling which are which.
We've mitigated some of these with a bit of night-before planning. Brushing hair before bed, for instance, makes brushing hair in the morning easier.
Which brings me to a MerusCase Release Day.
With every release we strive to make the process less stressful, for both our customers and ourselves. Previous releases have been marred by next-day, and sometimes even next-hour patches to rectify problems that weren't found during development and testing. With our own 'night-before planning' we have been consistently reducing the amount of emergency patching needed following a release.
Our 'night-before planning' consists of an ever-expanding suite of automated tests that ensure any new features work as they should, and just as importantly, don't break other, existing features. Writing these tests isn't sexy, and there's not a lot of public 'payoff' for getting them done since they aren't customer-facing; we have yet to receive a 'Thank you for that awesome test you wrote' email from a customer. But, much like the pre-brushed hair, which is only seen by the next day's anointed lovey (and the multitude of runners-up), they make sure the release goes smoothly, and that our customers see the ever-increasing benefits of using MerusCase.
Written by David Glass, Project Manager & Server Engineer at MerusCase
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