Another thing that I learned in 2008: the build manager can’t be responsible for ensuring the quality of the code that they build and deploy. We had QA’s but there were loads of little things to check: Were the release instructions accurate? Was there a rollback process? Did all the scripts actually work?
I did have some success in getting the obvious issues caught with a test. There were ongoing issues with file encodings until I had someone write a validator that could be run from a unit test framework. The same approach also managed to catch issues like incompatible database scripts.
All in all though, there was too much to do. We managed to get the checklist passed up to the developers and release managers. We won that battle. I lost the war.
(image taken from jluster’s photostream)
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