VanDev: Frequent Releases - The Ultimate Risk Mitigation Strategy

In July we've lined up Owen Rogers of Pulse Energy to present on the benefits of making frequent releases. Part of the Agile Manifesto is to "Deliver working software frequently" but our intuition suggests that releasing too often will drown us in overhead. Join us as Owen shows us that we can structure our processes to minimize the overhead and realize astonishing benefits by releasing software frequently. Following the presentation we'll have a door prize draw, round-the-room introductions, and then open networking. This is a networking event so be sure to bring your business/contact cards and a story or two to share.

About the Presentation:

"There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction." - JFK

Deploying software releases to production every week, every day or even many times per day seems crazy to most IT groups. However this is exactly what many of the highest traffic sites consistently do. In fact, frequent releases are a key competitive advantage for these companies precisely because, contrary to expectation, releasing frequently tends to reduce risk rather than elevate it. The processes, tools and technologies adopted by these teams represents a sea change in the software industry.

This session highlights many ways in which frequent releases serves to reduce the risk of software systems and is, in many ways, a more conservative strategy than traditional longer release cycles.

About the Speaker:

Owen Rogers is a developer at Pulse Energy, where his team has been deploying releases to production every week for the past year. He is formerly an Agile coach and consultant with ThoughtWorks helping teams make the transition to Agile methods in Sweden, UK, India, China and Canada. He is a regular speaker at Agile conferences and is one of the organizers of Agile Vancouver. He has been the project lead for a number of open source tools including CruiseControl.NET, dbdeploy.net and NMock.