Release Week recap: five releases, and the workflow changes
This past week, we shipped five releases in five days. Monday to Friday. Today I want to share what made it possible.
It started late on a Friday night. I messaged the team: "What about we do 5 releases next week?"
Our PM replied "2/day will be better." He was being sarcastic. Nobody thought it was serious.
We did it anyway.
You saw it happen live. Packaging and the new variation editor on Monday. The EDD migrator on Tuesday. S3 and Cloudflare R2 on Wednesday. Advanced inventory on Thursday. Full browsing history inside every order on Friday.
150+ pull requests. Five different release leads. Zero weekends worked.
Some of those features were already built and just sitting there waiting. The bottleneck was never the code. It was everything around it. So we fixed that pipeline and ran it five days straight.
The 5 changes that made it possible:
- Devs write the release notes, not marketing. The person who built the feature knows the edge cases and what users actually need to understand to get value out of it.
- Docs ship before the release, not after. If the docs are not ready, the release does not go out. Dev, docs, and release all land on the same day.
- Deploy to ourselves first. Every release goes to fluentcart.com before it reaches wp.org or our Pro customers. FluentLogs is our final safety net in production.
- Rotate the release lead. Each day a different person owned the release from start to finish. It stopped being five releases I was managing and became five releases five people owned.
- Test on every PR, not at the end. Human testing runs in parallel with development, so by the time code is ready to ship, most of the testing is already done.
I wrote a longer post on what we changed and why, with the before-and-after diagrams of our pipeline and what we have learned. You can read it here:
https://fluentcart.com/blog/five-releases-in-five-days/
What was your favorite release from the week? Curious to hear what actually made a difference for you.
Fluentlogs??? Sounds cool!!
Darren Cowley that's an internal tool we have built.
Shahjahan Jewel sounds like something that would have saved me many hours!! I see services out there selling real time monitoring for stores including the purchase flow, maybe it could become public one day….
Darren Cowley You can actually use FluentLogs here: https://fluentlogs.com/
We use on our live sites to catch the php errors / notices.
Shahjahan Jewel amazing thank you!!
Pierre I will take a look. It’s hosted in cloudflare worker. Will take a look.
That's an impressive release week. It worked because of the flow you mentioned in your post. Of course, that means tomorrow is a good release date for FliuentPlayer 😀
It was an exciting week! I loved how you went about it.
Great work! When is the release week for FluentCommunity? 😀
Love the new stock inventory. This has been something I’ve been waiting for and I love how you’ve made it easy to update on a multi variation single product. Super slick!
I’d love to see you folks start producing performance analysis for your releases in all of your products because I’m noticing my systems are getting bogged down especially since I’m running 4 Fluent products on my server now and looking to add a fifth but I’m nervous due to performance issues.
having some kind of systems sizing chart with a matrix showing your products and load would be an awesome document for us.
keep up the great work! Hope to see the ability to add a category icon on the home page of the store for each category that users can select and or also the ability for us to prioritize what items show up first on the Home Screen. Does not seem to be an option to do that yet, they just show up in the order that they were added.
Any update on dev licenses when you sell software licenses? So you can create a license you can use as test license during development without having to buy the product yourself?