Background: A tech company experiences slow software deployment, causing frequent delays in launching updates. This has led to customer dissatisfaction and a decline in product reliability perception.
Workaround:
The development team decides to increase manual testing and patching before each release to catch and fix issues quickly. This helps minimise the delays and ensures the software works as expected, but it’s not a perfect solution. It still consumes a lot of time and resources, adding to costs.
- Symptom: Slow software deployment and frequent delays.
- Workaround Applied: Manually patching and increasing testing time to catch last-minute issues.
Deeper Analysis:
Upon investigation, it is found that the cause of frequent delays is frequent bugs and integration issues appearing late in the development cycle. The manual patching helps to catch some of these issues, but it doesn’t address why they happen in the first place.
- Cause: Frequent bugs and integration issues late in the development process.
Root Cause:
Looking further, the root cause was discovered to be a lack of proper code review and integration testing throughout the development process. Developers worked in silos, leading to a buildup of conflicts that were only noticed during final integration.
- Root Cause: Lack of continuous integration and code reviews during development.
Solution:
The company decides to implement a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline with automated testing and regular code reviews. This allows bugs to be detected earlier and fixed immediately, avoiding the last-minute rush to patch things up. Additionally, it encourages collaboration among developers, ensuring that code conflicts are resolved quickly and cleanly.
- Solution: Implementing a CI/CD pipeline with automated testing and regular code reviews.
Outcome: With the new solution in place, the team can deploy software more reliably and quickly. The need for manual patches is reduced, and customers are happier with the timely, high-quality updates.
Summary:
- Workaround: Manual patching and extended testing time.
- Symptom Addressed: Slow software deployment.
- Cause: Bugs and integration issues detected late.
- Root Cause: Lack of continuous integration and code reviews.
- Solution: Implementing a CI/CD pipeline with automated testing.
This scenario illustrates how a workaround can temporarily relieve symptoms but doesn’t solve the underlying issue. Giving developers greater access to testing tools and avoiding manual steps is a winner.
