In most environments, a production deployment is synonymous with product release. Almost always linked – a big deployment day with great effort dedicated to testing pre- and post-deployment.

This means; the trusted, tested and working software becomes available to the users. For the development team; it might mean a weekend in the office, a week of regression testing, a lack of environments for integrating new software currently being worked on, and a complicated process of emergency deployments to fix any production issues identified after the release.

Is this by design within the team? Or are there certain improvements we can make?

I’m convinced the way that we couple these slows us down and it’s time we put more focus on measures that can improve our cycle and that it starts with decoupling our production deployments from the product release.