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Code Freezes during the holidays?
- Thread starter FlashEV0625
- Start date
Every tech company you know has a code and change freeze from US Thanksgiving through "cyber Monday". And then several weeks leading up to Christmas and Boxing day, and then again during major holidays like singles day in China, etc. And they all have agreements with their service providers that require them to obey the same blackout dates.
I run software development in a tech company, and have never heard about this. We write code and release to critical production every single day, it would make no sense to stop doing that weeks before Christmas.
Same here. I've been in software development over 20 years and we've never had such code freezes as mentioned above.
Neat. I've worked at companies that provide services to every shopping, social media, and streaming site/service you can think of. Every single one of them has a code freeze during this time.
Can’t say this statement helps make you sound more credible.
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That's fine. You have your experience with your software company, I have my experience providing services to all of the major players on the Internet.
I did a quick search, and found a few pieces by several people you might be interested in.
Holiday Preparedness - When and How to Handle the Code Freeze Process
Keep Your Development Trains Running Through the Holiday Code Freeze
(I can tell you first hand Amazon has an internal code freeze, as well as a code freeze they impose on their vendors like DNS providers, network (transit and peering) providers, cache providers, etc.)
Google's Big December Code Freeze – TechCrunch
(I also know that Google has a code freeze policy in place similar to Amazon's)
VPCIO Change Freeze Dates and Definitions - UBIT - University at Buffalo
And, of course, Freeze (software engineering) - Wikipedia
So, you can say my statement doesn't make me sound more credible, but as you can see it's quite simple to find examples of exactly what's being discussed here. Just because you don't do it doesn't mean it isn't done widely across the industry, or especially in the sectors I mentioned.
Much more prevalent for retail-centric companies to reduce risk during financially-critical periods.
My company did $150M in revenue on Black Friday ... we def went into code freeze (director-level permission required for exceptions such as mission-critical bug fix deploys).
That said, I doubt Tesla will ... I just doubt they’ll be rolling out major features due to staff PTO.
My company did $150M in revenue on Black Friday ... we def went into code freeze (director-level permission required for exceptions such as mission-critical bug fix deploys).
That said, I doubt Tesla will ... I just doubt they’ll be rolling out major features due to staff PTO.
Maybe people did that 10 years ago, but that strategy is simply incompatible with modern software development. Freezing code before major holidays would at best be very unproductive, what will your developers do if they cannot write code? It's their job. To keep a company efficient, the developers should use all their time to write code, and less time for meetings and "code-freezes".
Modern software development is less about versions, and all about continuous software delivery. As long as the developers are on job, software is delivered at various stages.
I'm telling you first hand that the largest online store you can think of actively does freezes EVERY YEAR. Also, think of the major streaming platforms besides Netflix. They also do this EVERY YEAR. Again, first hand experience. You're wrong, I provided links that show you're wrong. There's really no need to continue digging on this.
They write code, they produce PRs. That code doesn't get merged until after code freeze. Only emergency fixes are allowed to be pushed to production.
This is going to blow your mind, but "modern software development" comes in all forms.
CI/CD pipelines are great in lots of places. There are lots of places that still don't use them by choice. And if you're not merging branches to whatever you deploy from, then the CD pipeline doesn't have anything to do. I really shouldn't need to explain that to someone of your knowledge level.
Well, obviously there are plenty of ways to do things, and more traditional ways to do things may work for some. This is getting ridiculous comparing penises, but what do you know about my work?
Since this is a Tesla forum I assume we still talk about Tesla. Tesla is a company that likes to get things done. I also like to get things done, and this is also how we managed to beat a large German software company with a task they said would take 2 years with 5 developers. We did the exact same job in 6 months with 2 developers, where 3 months were in production with important customers with continuous delivery. We literally sold the product for a year before our competitor made their goals, now that makes a serious impact on any tech-firm. Tesla/Elon is also like this, you don't meet ambitious goals with ridiculous code-freezes that do nothing but disprove the confidence you should have in your team's code.
Modern development process is highly depending on code making its way to production, because whatever code you have in production you know exactly how it impacts your business. The longer your dev code falls behind production, the more likely these PRs will be a real struggle to merge safely into prod, which will further impact the team's progress taking the next step. There is NO need to introduce artificial limits to when it's safe to merge new code/features, the rules are the same no matter time of year.
We're not doing that.
Literally nothing. Same you know about mine, or the companies I'm talking about.
Right it would create a bigger mess after the holidays because development doesn’t stop.
The whole modern development process is based on continuous development.
Im sure the whole release process from Tesla is a complex pipeline of multiple things going on. Stopping that pipeline would cause more problems than prevent them.
Exactly!!
Jamming the output (merges & deployment) causes code to pile up. Once developers are back from holiday, you got a bottlenecke releasing a backlog of work of 10's of developers which is no longer fresh in memory. So the risk mitigated before holidays is doubled/tripled after. And its closer to traditional software dev where you drop huge releases every half year, rather than lots of small releases every day (or in Tesla's case every 2 weeks).
The other problem with DrDabble's approach is that your developers is now a month of coding away from the baseline which is the code running in production. This inhibits valuable progress for the next step. If you're only doing small patches, that might be a smaller problem, but I'm assuming Tesla, like our company, does rather large changes quite often because they move fast forward.
Neat. Go tell Amazon they do it wrong. I bet they'll totally let you off their forced freeze period, and they'd love to implement your strategy for their .com properties.
Without naming where I work, my company definitely has very specific rules about not changing anything in production (including rolling out new builds to the public) unless absolutely required during Christmas holiday period. My company is very well-known in the US and certain parts of the world.
So, I'll add a +1 company to what DrDabbles said.
It is partly related to the above. I cannot elaborate much beyond this.
So, I'll add a +1 company to what DrDabbles said.
Each to their own I guess. Our strategy works very well and in our market we are much faster than our competitors. If your strategy works in your market and it gives you the edge you need, you don't need to change anything.
The discussion is about the period before holidays, not during the holidays (where the devs should be home). Most changes can be be unwinded/reverted just as easily as they are deployed as long as the CD is well under control.
I do agree that not-easily-unwindable upgrades to 3rd party software that you don't have 100% control can wait until a time where most people can be alert. Luckily 99% of changes are unwindable.
I don't understand why one would assume anything about where they work, or where their friend works, or literally anything any company does would have any bearing on what Tesla does.
Unless/until someone from Tesla posts what their practices are this thread is useless.
Unless/until someone from Tesla posts what their practices are this thread is useless.
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