This post from Charity Majors on Friday deploys is well worth reading.
In the past I’ve seen her comment on how deployments should be carried out fearlessly regardless of when, and I’ve often felt like saying “yeah, well, …”. Because of course I agree with that as a goal, but many real-world orgs and conditions make it challenging.
This most recent post talks about the situations when those freezes can make sense, even if they’re not ideal. And in particular I like the discussion about what really needs to be frozen is not deploys, but merges:
To a developer, ideally, the act of merging their changes back to main and those changes being deployed to production should feel like one singular atomic action, the faster the better, the less variance the better. You merge, it goes right out. You don’t want it to go out, you better not merge.
The worst of both worlds is when you let devs keep merging diffs, checking items off their todo lists, closing out tasks, for days or weeks. All these changes build up like a snowdrift over a pile of grenades. You aren’t going to find the grenades til you plow into the snowdrift on January 5th, and then you’ll find them with your face. Congrats!