You might agree that it would be nice to have the confidence to deploy at any time. But how do we get there?

Of course many books have been written on software stability, quality, automated testing, deployment scripts, and all of the technical bits that go into such a thing. But there’s one conceptual piece I want to talk about today that I think is the linchpin holding all of this together:

Whomever writes the code should be responsible for deploying the code.

This could be an individual, or it could be a team effort. The point is that the functionality being deployed ought to have a common ownership, start to finish. This affords us two big benefits (not an exhaustive list):

• There is no “wall of confusion” as there is when development passes off code to some other group for deployment
• There’s a heightened sense of ownership and responsibility. The developers writing the code know that if things fall over, it’s on them

So if you’re dreaming of a day when you’ll be confident enough to deploy on pay day, tax day, game day, or Friday, but you’re not there yet, consider whether your deployments might be streamlined so that the owners of the code can be the owners of the deployments.

And I’d love to hear: what obstacles are preventing you from getting there?